By now, you probably have been taking digital photographs exclusively for quite some time. Not many people, except the most stalwart of professional photographers, still shoot their pictures on film these days. Chances are you have your photos all stored on a hard drive or a photo gallery website, if they're digital, or in a shoebox if they're paper. Chances are all those precious memories are being ignored. If you would like a convenient way to share your memories, and generate interest in them, consider creating photo books. With digital photographs, it's easy to create permanent, hardbound photo books online. If you shot film, and your photos are still paper or slides, it's till pretty easy and affordable to digitize them and create photo books from them.

If you want to create photo books online, the first thing you need to do is assemble the photos you intend to but in the book. Choose them and decide what order they will be arranged into. Once you've done that, you need to think about any captions or other things you may want to write to accompany the photos. If you are old school and you have prints on paper of photos that you shot on film, you can still create photo books online. The first thing you need to do is scan the photos. Scanning is pretty easy and a decent quality flatbed scanner can be had very cheaply. There might be a learning curve. Don't be intimidated, learning curves are stressful when you're in the middle of them but once you're up to speed you quickly forget the pain of learning the task. If you don't want to scan the photos or slides yourself, its' easy and affordable to send them out to a service bureau who will scan them for you and give you digital photos back.

Once the photos are scanned, play around with arranging them on the page to arrive at the most pleasing arrangement possible. Don't just think about arrangements that look good. Instead, try to arrange the pictures to tell a story. This will guarantee that they'll look good together, as they have a built in relationship between them determined by the narrative. Once you have arrived at the storyline and arrangement of the photo book you're about to create, you should write any text that will accompany the photos. This can be as simple as notating the who, what and when of the photo, or you can write elaborate diary entries. It is up to you, and depends entirely on whom you want to read the book and what your personal preferences are.

The last step in the process is to upload the scans or photos to a photo gallery website that will print photo books for you. Once the photos are uploaded, the site will most likely have simple wizards to guide you through the process. Lastly, you just order the book to be printed and specify how many copies.