20 Years,
Millions of Memories:
The Stories Behind
Our Photo Books

“I am currently producing a series of photo books about a wonderful overseas trip I had in 2018. I have called them Trip of a Lifetime. I have completed and received Part 1 and Part 2. I have just uploaded Part 3 to albumworks tonight, and Part 4 is almost finished.

Creating my travel books has been just like being on my trip for a second time. I love the freedom I have with your program to create my own page layouts, combining photos with stories. The quality of the books I have completed already is exceptional!

My books sit on my coffee table and I look at them every day. My visitors are keen to look at them and always comment on the quality. Today, even my nine year old Grandson was looking at them and asking about the places I have visited.

Prior to starting my photo books, I researched 4 photo book companies. I am so pleased I chose albumworks to create my memories with, and I’m delighted to have such beautiful photobooks as a permanent record of the most meaningful trip I have ever had the good fortune to experience.

Thank you, albumworks!”

“Leo’s First Christmas was a loving tribute to my Grandson at 5 months of age, so that he can have memories he can look at and ‘hold’. It was my first book for him. Parents take lots of photos, but they remain on phones and are uploaded to social media, etc., so they are not readily accessible to a child, unlike the old faded photo albums I had from my childhood and loved.

Photo Books are a fabulous modern way to allow those memories to remain alive and vibrant - no fading or yellowing, or being lost to the Cloud. I have continued to make him books for each year and his Birthdays, which are my precious gifts to him and his parents, showing how much he is loved.”

“We have been making photo books with albumworks for many years, documenting our travels, and milestones in the lives of our two children. Almost thirty books, containing priceless memories. If our home in Western Australia were to be threatened by a bushfire, those books would be the first items to be packed in our car, after our dog and cats.

I have chosen a book that records a trip I took with my father in 2024. And I selected this one, not because it contains the best photos, or the most stunning landscapes, but rather for what it means, and the difference it makes, in the life of my dad.

Dad is 91, and he has Alzheimer’s. He started to show signs around ten years ago; gradually it worsened, but my mother was there to look after him, and she gradually reduced the scope of their lives, getting help where necessary, but reducing their activities to their home, and their garden.

While my father’s mind was ailing, so too was my mother’s body, her decline perhaps accelerated by her role as caregiver. When she passed in 2023, Dad was able to stay in our family home with the help of carers, but it seemed that he would soon need round-the-clock care.

So, I decided to take him on holiday. As a young man, Dad had spent several years in military intelligence, based largely on Cyprus. As his Alzheimer’s developed, and he began to live more in his past than in the present, his love of the island – and his identity as an ‘old soldier’ – became more frequent topics of conversation. Strangely, he had never returned to this place that he had loved so much, and I thought, why not? An 87-year-old man with Alzheimer’s, who hadn’t travelled further than the local supermarket for ten years… what could possibly go wrong?

In March 2024 we boarded a plane at Luton airport. When offered a wheelchair, he insisted on walking. We made it to Paphos in time for lunch. He still loved Greek food. Over the next few days we covered the length and breadth of the island; we stood in the places where he had taken photographs in the 1950s, from Paphos in the west to Limassol in the south, Nicosia in the centre, and Famagusta in the east. The guardroom where he had spent so many nights as guard commander was still there; so too the vineyards, the orange groves, and the scent of spring flowers in the mountains. For a few wonderful days, blurry black and white pictures of then, took on the visceral, high resolution colour of now.

Two years on, now firmly in the grip of his Alzheimer’s, Dad is in a care home. He struggles to recognise me when I visit, and cannot remember the names of my wife and children. ‘How are your lot?’ he asks, if he asks.

But on the table by his favourite chair is his copy of the Cyprus photo book. He has annotated some of the pages in barely-legible, spidery writing. Each day he goes through the book, to remind himself. And each day, one of his carers asks him about it, and about Cyprus. ‘I went there,’ he responds, ‘on a holiday.’ He then talks about his life in the army, and how he’s a tough ‘old soldier.’ It gives him something to talk about, and something for others to talk to him about. It gives him a connection between his past and his present, and a promise of a future in which he can still feel he belongs.”

“When my mother died, I inherited a shoe box filled with letters written to her by my father during World War II. On reading them, I found that they offered such fascinating insights into the two people who were my parents, as well as into the historic events and social mores of the time, that they should be preserved and made accessible to my family and future generations.

Using the format of a photobook, I made a book incorporating photos of the letters with transcriptions of them, together with snippets of family history mentioned in the letters. I also included the very few photos I had from this period, as well as other family photos and photos of newspaper clippings that had also been kept by my mother.

I ordered a copy for each of my grandchildren, so that this particular part of our family history will be preserved, thanks to an albumworks photobook.”

“Our journey around Australia wasn't just a holiday. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chapter of our lives. That's why I created The Great Australian Wander Photo Books. They don't simply capture where we went; they tell the story of our adventure.

What I love most about albumworks is the freedom it gives me. I can move photos and text, change the layout and even spread a destination across two pages if that's what the story needs. Each page was designed to recreate not just what we saw, but what we experienced.

Years from now, I don't think we will open these books just to remember what Lucky Bay or Uluru looked like. We will remember what it felt like to stand on those shores and beneath that vast sky. We'll remember the conversations, the laughter, the unexpected detours and the simple joy of having the freedom to explore this incredible country together.

That's what makes these Photo Books so special. They don't just preserve photographs; they preserve the emotions, the stories and the priceless chapter of our lives. Long after the journey is over, those memories will still be there, waiting to be relived every time we turn a page.”

“For the past 16 years, I have exclusively used albumworks to create a considerable number of photobooks for myself, family and friends.

But my most meaningful photobook is titled Cooking with Daphne Hazel, which I gave to my Mum for her 86th birthday in 2010. This was the very first photobook I created and contains a lifetime of my Mum’s handwritten recipes and memorable family photos to celebrate her special love of family and cooking, particularly those relating to food and numerous food-related activities. For example, on the pages showing Daphne’s seafood recipes, I used photos of Daphne happily fishing and crabbing on the family boat.

Although my Mum is no longer with us, Daphne’s cookbook is on permanent display in my own kitchen and will always be meaningful to me because it reminds me of Daphne’s love and devotion to her family.”

“In 2015, my partner and I celebrated our 50th Birthdays in Botswana, Africa.

The thrill of seeing elephants, lions and hippos up close was the most exciting experience we have ever had.

If we live to see another 50 years, we will never forget the terrifying but exhilarating sound of lions roaring in the night, right next to our tent window.

albumworks books bring the adventure back to life!”

“The most meaningful albumworks Photo Books I've made are my two family history albums – one for my mum's family and one for my dad's.

I've always been fascinated by where my family came from, and over the last few years I've spent countless hours researching old records, restoring faded photographs and tracking down relatives to learn more about our shared history. I wanted to bring all of that together in a way that my whole family could enjoy.

One of the most rewarding parts has been sharing the albums with relatives. Many have recognised faces they hadn't seen for decades or discovered stories they never knew. Seeing those reactions has made all the time and effort worthwhile.

I created these albums not just for today, but for tomorrow. My hope is that my children, and one day their children, will be able to open these books, learn about the people who came before them and feel a connection to their family's story. These albums preserve our history in a way that loose photographs and computer files never could, ensuring that our family's memories can be shared and treasured for generations to come.”

“For years, I stored my photos on CDs and external memory banks. Recently, I realised that I never see my work and should consider putting them into a book. I chose my best images from Turkey, taken in 2015, and when loading them into the digital software, the staff were very helpful.

Not only do I finally have my first book and love looking at the images, but I can also leave a legacy of my work for my grandchildren to remember me by.”

“Definitely Antarctica (from so many books I have done), my seventh continent visited. The pristine landscape, the Arctic plunge, the various penguin varieties, whales and seals - it is a photographer’s dream. To come back home and be able to capture these moments in a beautiful albumworks photo book is priceless.”

“I have made 25 books with albumworks, all very precious to me, mainly of our travels. After taking thousands of photos to pick the extra special ones for the albums, it is an effective way to share our joy of travel with others and a beautiful reminder for ourselves.

However, the most special ones I have made are for our immediate family members, capturing their life story to date in words and photos, including my own. These books are not only treasured by their owners now, but also provide a long living record for our descendants to come.”

“Over the last ten years, I have made more than twenty photo books. Each time we travel, I make a coffee table book of the photos from our trip. Every book and every trip is special, so how can I choose one that is more meaningful?

The other style of book I make is family history books. These are created by photographing old black and white family photos from generations ago and putting together a story about the people and their lives. These books are called Chapters in Life, and they are perhaps the most meaningful, as they record the lives of ancestors and will be treasured by generations to come.

albumworks is a great program to use, and I always have another book in the planning stages.”

“Since 2017, I’ve created two dozen albumworks 12x12” Photo Books, primarily to combine my travel diaries with my photos. In amongst this collection of books, which is still expanding as I continue to travel, there is one that is particularly special for me and an old mate – a book I entitled Wandering Through the Hindu Kush - Sept-Nov 1978.

In 2020, a very close friend was diagnosed with and began treatment for multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. We had gone to high school together in the early 1970s and then, a few years later, in 1978, we travelled together from Kashmir in India, through the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, then via the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. It was a perilous journey, entirely undertaken by public transport and, for several weeks in Pakistan, mostly on foot.

During these travels I had written a diary that I had never bothered to re-read, and I had a handful of low-quality, rather grainy photo prints stored for the last 40 years in a shoebox. I had taken them with a cheap, plastic Kodak camera.

My mate’s diagnosis got me thinking and, to give him something to focus on while undergoing gruelling chemotherapy and then a stem-cell transplant, I decided to create a book about our journey.

Back in the 1970s, there was no digital photography. Everything about photography while travelling in those remote parts of Central Asia was fraught. Film was relatively expensive, I had no idea if a particular photo was properly in focus or correctly exposed, and given the risk of theft and the extremes of our physical travel, there was no guarantee that the photos would ever be successfully developed. In the end, I had about 100 usable photos, although the quality varied considerably.

I typed up the diary and used one of the ‘old paper’ backgrounds to lay it out with a collection of different media. To illustrate the diary, I combined scans of my old photos, photos of a few hand-drawn sketches from my diary and scans of a few bits of ‘ephemera’ – bus tickets, government forms and official permits to enter Pakistani tribal territory, as well as scans of a collection of 40 old postcards that I had purchased at the time. I always bought a few postcards along the way, in the belief that my amateur attempts at taking photos would come to nothing.

When I submitted the book, the staff at albumworks kindly took the trouble to contact me unprompted, before the book went to print, to let me know that my own photos were somewhat pixelated due to the very low quality of the original prints. With their help and the albumworks software, I managed to improve these to an acceptable level.

My mate was thrilled to receive the book. We sat for hours, using it to revive long-forgotten memories of our travels together. Very fortunately, my mate responded well to treatment and has remained more-or-less in remission from this cancer for these past few years.

I recently visited him and we pulled out the book for another reminiscence of our decades-old adventures in the Hindu Kush. While we did that, we decided to take a picture together, “recreating” the only photo that we took together in all those months of travel. We have certainly aged a bit!

We also took a photo together, with our precious book.

If I am lucky enough to win one of the prizes from albumworks, I am going to redo this book. I have now learnt to use digital software to vastly improve the resolution of old photos and am much more familiar with all of the features that albumworks offers through its excellent proprietary software. I have also found a bit more documentary “ephemera” that I can include to make the “Second Edition” a more complete account of those days when we could travel to places that we can never see for ourselves again.”

“I created an album to catalogue all of my father’s artworks of which I had originals or copies. The album spans the years from when, in 1934, he studied art at Collingwood Technical College until he was 15 years old, through his years of WWII, his married life and some of his work as a commercial artist, until his death in 1968 at age 47.

The artworks are all done by hand in a way that is not at all usual now, and the amount of detail is extraordinary. I felt the collection I had needed to be shared with other family members and kept for future generations to see.

This album I created, with albumworks’ help, stirred a lot of interest from my family, who then purchased 11 more albums. I feel able now to donate the originals of the commercial artworks to the museum.”