Planning the Photo Book

Before you start a project some initial planning helps to get organized and save time creating the MZ3 title. Here a short guideline:

 

How many titles will I create? 1, Important for the folder structure
Does my title have different versions or issues? no, (usually yes: at least 1 test and a final version)
What type of title will be needed?  both, Online and/or Offline version? 
Where to store all titles?  On your desktop in the folder "my photo_book"
Could be stored anywhere, also on a separate disk
(NAS: Network accessible storage)
What will be the name of my title and version? 

No book name, no version name
Later the title/book name will clearly identify your title. The version name is optional and can be a date, a number/index, some descriptive text
What content should be included in the title/book?
Images, video, sound, PDF pages, forms, ... 		 Only images will be used as content in the first step; they will be located in the megazine/images/ folder.
  • How to sort the images? Naming schema?
  • What is the size of the images?
  • Do they have a different ratio?
  • What kind of format: all landscape or landscape and portrait?
  • How many images per page?
  • Should the landscape formatted pictures be spread across 2 pages?

The images are of different dimensions, aspect ratio and orientation (portrait and landscape). They are unsorted and named automatically like "imx_h1.jpg", "img_h2.jpg"
Aspect Ratio 2:3 is the broadest.

For the size of the pages a 
page-width of 500 px and
page-height of 740 px is chosen.

This is a compromise for 3:4 and 3:2 images and 1 image per page. Spreadpages are not used in the first step.

Resolution/quality of the images:
The original, maximal resolution is used; optimization will be done later. Scale to fit will be defined for every image, i.e. all images will be scaled to a maximal height of 480 px, which leaves room for a 10 px border at top and bottom.
Besides images: is text (caption) needed?
Or will a text showing up on hovering over with the mouse be sufficient?

No, not in the first step

Actually it is not yet possible to automatically show information contained in the images (EXIF). This is planned for future versions. This has to be done manually...
What should the page background look like?
Simply colored or a page with texture? 

Simple color: #e4e4d4, a light sand color.

There are many more questions that will be discussed and answered in other tutorials and articles, like:

How is the best design for the title?
What tools to use?
What special effectsare needed needed:

- stiff pages, links, colored background,
- own logo, table of content, bookmarks, ...

A more complete check list will be provided later

In the first step: no special effects