What to write in a photo book
Most photo books fail at the text, not the pictures. Either there is nothing at all, and the book becomes a slideshow with no memory attached, or there is too much of the wrong kind: sentences like "an unforgettable day with the people we love most" that could sit under any photo ever taken. What to write in a photo book has a few reliable answers, and you can learn them in an afternoon.
A caption carries what the photo cannot show
The photo already shows the room, the clothes, the weather and the faces. Repeating any of that wastes the only text a reader will actually read. "Everyone smiling at the beach" is a description of a JPEG.
What a photo cannot show is everything outside the frame: names, the year, why they were there, who was holding the camera, what happened the following week, what the place is now.
That is the whole test. Read your caption, then cover the photo. If the sentence still tells you something, it has earned its place. If it evaporates without the picture, cut it or rewrite it.
The best captions tend to hold one fact the reader could not have guessed, and then stop.
Four formulas that cover most photos
The workhorse: who, where, when, plus one thing you cannot see. "Mum outside the shop, 1974, the year before it closed." Ten words, and the last five do all the work.
The what-happened-next: state the moment, then jump forward. "The first night in the new flat. They stayed nineteen years." This is the formula that makes people cry at photo books, and it costs you one extra sentence.
The point-at-one-thing: name a detail in the frame a reader would otherwise skim past. "Note the wallpaper. Dad hung it himself and never once let us forget it."
The correction: use the caption to fix the impression the photo gives. "It looks like a holiday. It was the week we moved and nobody could find the kettle." Use this one sparingly, two or three times in a book.
How long, and where the longer pieces go
Most captions should run eight to twenty words. That is one or two lines under a photo, which is about what a reader’s eye will take before it moves to the next image.
A book also needs a handful of longer pieces or it has no shape. Two or three hundred words at the start of each chapter, setting up the era: where everyone lived, who was born, what changed. People do read these, because they arrive before the photos rather than in between them.
The length that almost never works is the middle one. A hundred-word block wedged under a single photo stops the book dead, and nine times out of ten it is a chapter introduction that ended up in the wrong place. Move it to the front of the section.
Vary the rhythm on purpose. Four captions in a row of identical length reads like a catalogue, and readers start skipping.
When to write nothing
Silence is a legitimate choice and an underused one. A full-page photo with no text says the picture is enough, and on the right photo that lands harder than any sentence you could write.
Skip the caption when the photo explains itself and is unremarkable, when the caption would only repeat the chapter heading, and when a spread already carries two captions and a third would turn it into a wall of small print.
A working ratio is that half to two thirds of photos get text. Annotating every single one flattens the emphasis: if everything is captioned, nothing is highlighted.
One thing overrides all of this. Always name the people, even in a book that is otherwise silent. Faces are the one piece of information that becomes unrecoverable, and it happens faster than anybody expects.
The photos where nobody remembers
Every collection has them. A wedding where three of the four people are unidentified. A beach that could be two different countries. A baby who is either you or your uncle.
Before guessing, check what is actually available. The back of a print often carries a lab date stamp or a pencilled note. Digital files carry a capture date and often GPS coordinates in their metadata. Photo lab envelopes, if any survived, are usually dated.
Then ask, and ask the right people: the oldest one, and ideally two of them separately. Two people remembering the same afternoon differently is itself worth writing down, and it is more honest than picking a winner.
When the answer stays unknown, write the uncertainty into the caption instead of hiding it. "Early sixties, we think. Nobody is sure who the woman on the left is." That is a true sentence, and it invites the one reader who does know to say so. A confident guess becomes family fact within a generation and is almost impossible to undo.
Write for a reader who is not you
The person who most needs this book has not been born yet, or is currently eleven. They do not know that "the cottage" means your grandmother’s house, or that Uncle Ray is your father’s brother rather than a neighbour who came to everything.
The rules that follow from that are dull and effective. Give people their full name the first time they appear, plus their relationship to somebody the reader already knows. Write the year, not "that summer". Name the town, not "back home".
Cut the in-jokes unless you explain them, and the explanation is usually the better caption anyway. Why the fridge was called Gerald is worth more than the phrase itself.
Read your captions aloud to somebody from a different branch of the family. Every place they stop and ask a question is a caption missing one fact.
Getting the first draft written
The reason books ship with no text is almost never that nobody had anything to say. It is that facing sixty blank caption fields at once is a wall, and people put it off until the project quietly dies.
Lower the stakes on the first pass. Type anything true under every photo, however plain, in one sitting, without editing. A page of mediocre captions is easy to improve. An empty page is not.
Yujee runs that first pass for you: it groups the photos, drafts a caption for each one and the chapter text around them, and lays out the pages, so what you open is a draft to correct rather than a blank. You edit it by chatting with it, and what you download is a 300 DPI print-ready PDF that you take to a print shop yourself if you want it bound.
Either way, the corrections are the point. No tool knows that the woman on the left is your great-aunt, or that the shop closed the following spring. That only exists in your head, and a book is the place to put it.