A travel photo book of Portugal: Lisbon, Algarve and the north in chapters

Portugal is a trip in three parts for most visitors: a few days in Lisbon, a stretch on the Algarve coast, and the north, usually Porto and the Douro. It photographs well and it produces a camera roll with a clear structure, which makes it a good example of how a travel book falls into chapters. This article walks through a typical ten-day route, how the chapters come out of the photos, what to write in the brief, and how big the book should be.

Let the geography make the chapters

A phone writes a GPS position and a capture time into every photo it takes with location services on. MakeAlbum reads both on upload. Photos taken in the same place on the same day cluster together; the clusters follow the order you travelled in; each cluster becomes a chapter with a draft title. For a trip that moves between three regions, that gives three chapters before you touch anything, and often more.

Take a route of three nights in Lisbon, four on the Algarve and three in the north. The chapters that come out of it, in the order they were shot:

• Lisbon. Alfama, the miradouros, Belém, a day trip to Sintra. Three days in one city usually arrive as one chapter. If you want the day in Sintra on its own, ask the editor for more chapters, or for chapters by day, and the roll is regrouped.
• Algarve. Lagos, the Ponta da Piedade cliffs, the Benagil caves, an afternoon at Sagres. Four days along a coast split by place when the stops are far enough apart, so Lagos and Sagres tend to separate, while two beaches a few kilometres apart tend to merge.
• Porto and the Douro. The Ribeira, the wine lodges across the river in Gaia, a day up the valley to Pinhão. Porto is one chapter; the Douro day, being 100 km away, is another.

Photos without GPS, from a camera or a phone with location off, fall back to capture time and content for their chapter. A camera carried alongside the phone lands in the right place as long as its clock was set.

The travel photo book page describes this chapter-per-place flow in general; here it is applied to one country.

Chapter by place or chapter by day

Place makes the better chapter on a trip that moves. Day makes the better chapter on a trip that stays put. A week in one Algarve villa with excursions is a day book: Monday at the beach, Tuesday in Tavira, Wednesday on the boat. A ten-day loop is a place book.

You can switch in the chapter review. The default aims for three to eight chapters. Asking for chapters by day on the ten-day loop gives you up to ten, which is too many for a 26-page book and about right for 78. Asking for chapters by place on a villa week gives you two or three. The page count article explains why each chapter costs a spread before its photos do.

What to write in the brief

The brief is a free-text field on the album page, up to 4,000 characters. It is fed to the models that pick each chapter's hero frame and draft the chapter titles and captions, and it is treated as ground truth: names and places in the brief are used, and ones that are not in it are not invented. For a Portugal trip that matters, because the models will otherwise write "The coast" where you would write "Benagil".

A brief that works:

Ten days in Portugal, 12 to 22 May, with Marta and the kids (Leo, 7, and Sara, 4). Lisbon first, staying in Alfama; day trip to Sintra on the 14th. Then Lagos for four nights: Ponta da Piedade, the Benagil caves by boat on the 17th, Sagres at sunset. Train to Porto on the 19th; Ribeira, the port lodges in Gaia, and a day in the Douro at Pinhão on the 21st. Leo's first time on a boat was Benagil.

That gives the titles the place names spelled as you want them, the dates for each chapter, the children's names for captions, and one detail that can become a caption on the right page. Write it before curation runs, since the chapter titles are drafted then; you can re-roll any title or caption afterwards, and each re-roll reads the brief again.

Spelling is worth a moment. Portuguese place names carry accents (Belém, Pinhão, Sagres does not) and the brief is where they get set once.

What the pages look like

Each chapter opens with its strongest frame full-bleed and its title on the facing page. Portugal gives the curation easy openers: the tiled facade, the view from a miradouro, the cliffs at Ponta da Piedade, the Ribeira from the bridge. Inside the chapter, portraits and detail frames are paired or set inset on the square page, and a panoramic landscape can run across the spread because the layflat binding holds its middle.

Detail shots earn their place in a Portugal book more than most: azulejos, the pastel de nata on the tray, the trams, the port glasses. Two or three per chapter is the right amount; a whole page of them reads as a catalogue. The examples include a Lisbon weekend laid out this way, with the riverside and the old streets as chapters.

How big a book

For the ten-day route, 40 to 50 pages. The curation selects about 2.2 photos per interior page, so a 50-page book holds around 105 photos in five or six chapters, and costs €225 with shipping included. A 26-page book of about 60 photos in three chapters, one per region, costs €179 and is the better choice if you would rather have a book that gets read in ten minutes. A 78-page book at €279 suits a longer stay or a trip photographed by two people. Price is linear in between, so you can add a spread where the Algarve needs one without changing bracket; pricing has the table.

Upload the whole roll from both phones. Between 50 and 300 photos per album works best, and a ten-day trip on two phones usually lands in that range after both are exported. HEIC from an iPhone uploads as it is.

Delivered to Portugal, or home

MakeAlbum is based in Lisbon. The books are printed in Germany by our print partner and ship tracked from there. Production typically takes 4 to 6 working days after you approve, and delivery inside the EU a further 2 to 4, so plan on roughly 6 to 10 working days door to door. Shipping is included in the price and no VAT is added at checkout.

If you are ordering from Portugal or anywhere else in the EU, the delivery in Europe page has the specifics; from the United States, the US delivery page. The shipping address is entered at checkout.

A plan for the week after the trip

1. Export both phones and upload everything to one album. Do not prune the bursts of the same cliff; the filter does that.
2. Write the brief with the route, the dates and the names.
3. In the chapter review, check that the regions came out as you expected. Merge or split, rename, swap a hero if you prefer another frame.
4. Choose 26 or 50 pages, edit the spreads, approve.

The trip stays on the phone as two thousand frames. The book is the hundred that say where you were, in the order you went, with the names right.