How to make a baby book from your camera roll in one evening

The average parent takes about four thousand photographs in a baby's first year and prints none of them. The problem is not the photographs. It is that "make the baby book" is one enormous task with no first step. Here is the first step, and the ones after it. The whole thing takes an evening if you do it in this order and refuse to do it in any other.

1. Pick by month, not by quality

Open the camera roll at the birth date and scroll forward one month at a time. For each month, pick three to six photographs that show something happening: a face, a hand, a room, a person. Ignore whether they are good. A slightly blurred photograph of the first laugh beats a sharp one of a sleeping baby every time.

Do not go back. Do not compare across months. A month with two photographs is a quiet month, and quiet months belong in the book.

Volume One does this step for you: point it at the camera roll and it sorts every photograph by month of life from the date the camera wrote, picks an even spread across each month, and lays them out. But the rule is the same by hand: one pass, forward, by month.

2. Add the words while you remember them

Under each month, write three sentences. Not captions: sentences. What happened, what they did, what you said. If you cannot remember, look at the photographs from that month and the texts you sent that week; the words are usually in the group chat.

This is the step people skip, and it is the step the grown child will care about. Photographs tell them what they looked like. Sentences tell them who you were.

3. Choose one photograph a month to make big

Every month has one photograph that deserves a whole page. Give it one. A full-page photograph, printed to the edge, changes a book from an album into something you would put on a coffee table. If your book lies flat, one photograph in the year can run across both pages.

4. Keep three real things

A hospital wristband. A card. A ticket from the first outing. Photograph each one flat, in daylight, on a plain surface, and put it in the month it belongs to. Three keepsakes in a year is plenty; they are the texture of the book, not its content.

5. Ask two other people for one line each

A grandparent, the other parent, an aunt. One sentence, in their words, for the month of their choosing. "She has my mother's chin." A book with three voices in it reads like a family; a book with one reads like a diary.

6. Print it, and print it flat

A book on a phone is a folder. Send it to print the same evening, before you start improving it. Choose a layflat binding if the service offers one, so the big photographs are not swallowed by the fold, and a square format, which suits the photographs a phone takes.

What this looks like in Volume One

The method above is the product. The camera roll is sorted by month of life; the book drafts each month's words from your texts and voice notes and leaves them penciled for you to approve; one photograph a month can be made a full page or a panorama from the framing tray; keepsakes are scanned with the phone; grandparents write in the margins through a family link; and on the first birthday a layflat book is printed and posted. The page count is the only number on the screen.

But you do not need the product to use the method. You need one evening, a forward scroll through the year, and the discipline not to go back.