Design your own wedding album

The hard part of a wedding album is not the layout, it is choosing. A photographer's gallery or a family's phones will hold bursts of the same moment, a dozen near-identical shots of the garlands, and plenty of photos with someone mid-blink. Kathaleaf's cull stage does the tedious part for you:

• Bursts and near-duplicates are grouped, and the highest-resolution shot in each group is marked as the best of the burst.
• Blurry and low-resolution photos are flagged, so you know before you place one that it will not print sharply.
• Every flag is only advice. Nothing is deleted, and you decide what stays.

Start by bringing everything together in one album: the photographer's high-resolution files, the best of the guests' phone photos, and anything saved in your Google Drive. iPhone HEIC photos go in as they are. Kathaleaf reads the date each photo was taken, so pictures from different cameras fall into the right order even when their file names do not.

Then work through the day one moment at a time and keep only what you would want to see in twenty years. A book of 40 to 60 pages is usually better with fewer, stronger photos than with every one.

A wedding album is read two pages at a time, so think in spreads. Kathaleaf's auto-flow lays your kept photos out in the order they were taken, at most two to a spread, which gives you a sensible first draft of the whole book in seconds. From there you rearrange by hand: reorder spreads, swap photos between pages, or build a collage for the candid moments. Spreads you arrange yourself are never overwritten when auto-flow runs again.

For a multi-day celebration, give each function its own run of spreads (the mehendi, the haldi, the sangeet, the ceremony, the reception) and let the biggest moments open a spread on the right-hand page. Choose the book size before you start: Kathaleaf offers A4 landscape and a 12-inch square, with 40, 50 or 60 interior pages. The square format is a classic for wedding albums; landscape suits group photos and wide venues.

Leave some breathing room. A spread with a single strong photo next to a quiet page often says more than a crowded collage, and a book that alternates the two keeps people turning pages. Put the photographs you would frame on their own; save collages for the dance floor, the food and the friends who all want to be in the book.

Design the front and back cover yourself, and add captions anywhere: names, a date, a line from the vows. Kathaleaf has a curated set of fonts, from a classic serif like EB Garamond to a script like Dancing Script, and you choose the colour. Photo edits (tone and crop) are non-destructive, so the original files are never changed and you can change your mind later.

When you are done, the Proof stage shows every spread and both covers at print resolution. What you see there is the layout that prints: check names and dates carefully, because the printer will reproduce exactly what is in the file.

Kathaleaf gives you a 300 dpi PDF with 3 mm of bleed in two versions: a CMYK file for a print shop and an RGB file for printing at home, plus a specification sheet that states the size, pages and settings in writing. For a wedding album, ask the shop for:

• layflat binding, so photos that cross the middle are not lost in the spine;
• 170–250 gsm silk or matte paper, which handles fingerprints better than gloss;
• lamination on the covers, so the book survives being passed around;
• printing at 100%, never “fit to page”;
• one test spread before the whole run, to check skin tones.

The print guide covers each of these in detail. Your photos are never uploaded to design or export the book; read more about that on the private photo book maker page. Printing and delivery by Kathaleaf is coming later.

One more tip: make two books from the same album. Once the main album is printed, the same PDF can be printed again for parents or grandparents, at any shop and at any time, without designing anything twice.