We Can Complete You Using Autofill in Photo Books

Picture this: A loved one has a birthday this month. You want to give something special because, seriously, if you give one more picture
frame or other knick-knack you’re going to be branded as an unimaginative gift giver. A gift you make yourself would be great, but between work, the kids’activities, and your own Bunco group, you don’t have a lot of time to make something. What to do; what to do?

We have an answer: Autofill a photo book with Inkubook. Autofill is a new feature of Inkubook that lets you pick your photos and make a book without spending tons of time building the pages yourself. Autofilled
books are available in our very popular 11″ x 8.5″ Classic Landscape style. (Down the road, we’ll expand the selection so that you can also make our other styles using the Autofill tool.)

How It’s Done

Here’s a breakdown of how Autofill works:

First, you start a new book project. When you do, you get to choose whether to use Autofill or to make your book from scratch. Choose Autofill My Book.

Select Autofill when starting a new book.

Then we’ll ask you a bit of basic information, such as what you’d like to call the project and whether that name should be on the cover. When that’s done, you’ll get to pick the theme of your book, which determines which starter set of backgrounds your book will include.

Select the theme you would like.

The last thing you have to do to help us complete your book is choose the photos that are going in it. Choose from your own computer or pull some in from Flickr. Can you imagine how easy it is to make a book when all you have to do is tell Flickr to let Inkubook have access to your photos? Right now, we even have a promotion available to Flickr members that entitles you to a free book!

Get images from your computer or from Flickr.

Regardless of whether you pick photos from your computer or from Flickr, we’ll put your book together just as fast as we can. Most of the time it takes to build the book is time spent pulling the files from the original storage location. The more photos you choose for your book, the longer that process takes. Once we have those photos, building the pages is a quick process. If you use a lot of photos, you can work on something else on your computer or walk away for a little while. You don’t have to sit and twiddle your thumbs while the Autofill magic happens. You just have to make sure to leave the page that has Inkubook working in it open so that we can go about our business.

After we’re done making your book, we suggest that you preview it to see how you like what we’ve done. You’re also free to go in and make any changes you’d like. You can add backgrounds, swap the order of photos, or even switch up the layouts. If you’re satisfied with what you see in the preview, you can call it done and place your order. Either way, you’ll have a book that didn’t cost you hours and hours to create.

What You Should Know

Autofill is almost so easy that you could do it while standing on your head, but we have a few suggestions that might help you with your Autofill experience.

1. If the order the photos appear in your book is important to you, you can try to organize them appropriately before uploading them from your computer. Do this by copying all the photos to one folder and putting numbers at the beginning of the filenames. The numbers should follow the order that you want the pictures to appear. If you have a total of 97 pictures, the first one should have a prefix of 01 and the last will have a prefix of 97.
2. If you’re using Flickr, create a new set that holds only the photos you’re going to use in the book. As Kit mentioned in an earlier post, photos are imported from Flickr in the order that you uploaded them in the first place—with some variation that’s created by the sizes of the files. If they’re put in the book out of order, you can move them around after the building process is complete.
3. We use a variety of layouts in Autofill, so each page of your book won’t be exactly identical to every other page. Some pages will have one photo, some will have two, and some will have four. It all depends on how many photos you have and how we think they’ll best be arranged. If you don’t like what we’ve come up with, you can do some editing after the book is built. Here’s an example spread from an Autofill book I made:

Pages from an Autofilled book.