The problem with travel photographs is that they are meaningless to everyone who was not there, and increasingly meaningless to you as the years pass. Which beach was that? Who is the man in the hat? The story is the part that gives the pictures their meaning, and it is the part almost nobody writes down.
Choose the shape first
Travel material resists structure, so decide early. One journey told in depth. A lifetime of trips grouped by place or by decade. A single theme, such as every mountain you climbed or every journey taken with one particular friend. An emigration, told once and properly, for the generations who came after.
Find the story, not the itinerary
A list of where you went and what you saw reads like a diary. What holds a reader is the person you met on the train, the meal that went wrong, the argument at the border, the moment the place changed how you thought about something. Go through your journals and photographs and mark the moments you would tell someone about in a pub. Those are the chapters.
- Why did you go, and what was going on in your life at the time?
- What surprised you in the first few hours?
- Who did you meet, and what happened to them?
- What went wrong, and what did it turn into?
- What did you eat that you still think about?
- What did you get wrong about the place before you went?
- What did you bring home that was not an object?
Use the photographs as prompts, not as the content
Work through your pictures in order and write a sentence about what was happening just before or just after each one. This is far easier than facing a blank page, and it produces the connective detail that makes a travel narrative readable.
Getting it into a finished book
Doing it yourself
- Sort years of photographs and journals into an order.
- Write the connecting narrative, which is the slow part.
- Lay out text and images together and arrange printing.
With Chapternity
- You talk through the journeys and Sage draws out the detail.
- It writes a travel narrative in chapters, not an itinerary.
- Your photographs sit alongside the parts they belong to.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I turn my travel photos into a book worth keeping?
- Choose a shape first, whether that is one trip, a theme or a lifetime grouped by decade, then find the moments you would actually retell rather than the itinerary. Use the photographs as prompts by writing a sentence about what happened just before or after each one.
- What is the difference between a travel memoir and a photo book?
- A photo book shows where you went. A travel memoir tells what it meant, including the people, the mishaps and what you brought home in perspective. Chapternity writes the narrative and places your photographs throughout.
Explore more guides or read about travel storys.