# 2,000 holiday photos and nothing to show for it: a practical way to turn them into one album > A two-week trip leaves a thousand photos and no album. What to keep, how to order it, why chapters help, and why 26 to 40 pages is usually enough. Source: https://makealbum.com/blog/2000-holiday-photos-one-album · MakeAlbum, Lisbon, Portugal 2026-09-03 · MakeAlbum team · 6 min read --- A two-week holiday on a modern phone produces somewhere between one and three thousand photos. A handful get posted, a few get sent to family, and the rest stay in the camera roll. Most people intend to make an album. Almost nobody does, and the reason is not printing. Printing is a form and a card payment. The reason is the step before it: opening two thousand photos and choosing eighty. ## The problem is choosing, not printing Camera rolls are not photo collections. They are everything the camera saw, including the nine frames you took of the same view because the first eight had someone walking through, the screenshots of boarding passes, the photos of menus and parking spots, the bursts of a jumping child, and the one frame in every fifty that you would actually put on a wall. Sorting that by hand means comparing near-identical frames, remembering which day was which, and making a few hundred small decisions in a row. That is why the album never happens. The way to get it done is to reduce the number of decisions, not to find more willpower. ## What to keep Start with what you are making: a book you will open a few times a year, with other people, at a table. That book needs far fewer photos than you think, and it needs a different mix than the camera roll contains. Keep, roughly in this order: - **The frames that establish where you were.** One wide shot per place is worth more than ten close-ups. The view from the balcony, the street, the beach on the first morning. - **People, doing something.** A photo of a person in a place says more than the place alone. The most looked-at pages in a family album are the ones where someone is eating, laughing, asleep in a chair. - **One frame from each burst, not the burst.** Bursts and near-duplicates are the bulk of a camera roll. Pick the sharpest or the one with the best expression and let the rest go. - **The detail shots that carry the trip.** The tiles, the fruit stall, the ticket. Two or three per chapter, never a whole page of them. Drop, without much thought: screenshots, photos of documents, blurred or badly exposed frames, and anything you took to remember something practical rather than to remember the trip. ## Put it in order, then in chapters Chronology is the default order for a holiday, and for good reason: it is the order you remember it in. Phones write a capture time and often a GPS position into each photo's EXIF data, so sorting by time is one click and the days fall into place. Then break the timeline into chapters. A chapter is a stretch of the trip that belongs together: a day in one town, an afternoon at the beach, the drive. Three to eight chapters covers almost any trip. Chapters do two things for the book. They give the reader a way to find their place, and they give you a smaller unit to make decisions in: choosing twelve photos for the beach afternoon is easy in a way that choosing eighty photos for the whole trip is not. Give each chapter a title that means something to the people who were there. The place and the day is fine; a phrase someone said is better. ## Why 26 to 40 pages is usually enough Decide the page count first, before selecting photos, not after. A MakeAlbum book has between 26 and 130 interior pages. The smallest, 26 pages, is 13 spreads, and the curation aims for roughly two photos per interior page, so it holds about 60 photos. That sounds small for a two-week trip, but a book you can read in ten minutes gets opened. A 130-page book is the right size for a wedding with several hundred guest photos or a whole year of a family, and it is heavy. A rough guide, based on what the curation targets: - 26 pages: about 60 photos, a long weekend or a short trip. - 40 pages: about 80 photos, a one-to-two-week holiday with three or four chapters. - 78 pages: about 170 photos, a long trip or a year in review. - 80 pages: about 170 photos, a wedding or a big year. Price follows page count in a straight line, from €199 for 26 pages to €349 for 80, about €2.78 per extra page, with shipping included. The [pricing page](https://makealbum.com/pricing) has the full table. The point of that structure is that adding a spread is a small decision, so you can start at 26 and add pages only where a chapter needs room. ## How MakeAlbum does the first pass If you would rather not do the sorting yourself, this is what happens when you upload the whole roll to MakeAlbum. It is described here honestly, including the parts that are heuristics rather than magic. **Every photo is read on upload.** The worker pulls the EXIF capture time, GPS position and camera from each file, computes a sharpness score (the variance of a Laplacian filter), a mean brightness for exposure and a perceptual hash for duplicate detection, and sends a downscaled copy to an image-recognition service that returns faces and content labels. **Screenshots and documents are set aside.** A frame is treated as a screenshot when its filename or EXIF software field says so, or when its content labels and aspect ratio look like a screen. Photos of documents get the same treatment. They are not deleted; they stay in the photo tray where you can put any of them back. **Near-duplicates collapse to one frame.** Two photos whose perceptual hashes are within a small distance are one moment. Frames shot within three seconds of each other with real camera timestamps are treated as a burst even when a reframe pushes the hash apart. From each family the best frame is kept, scored on the recognition service's quality estimate, sharpness, resolution and how many faces it contains. **The roll is ordered.** By EXIF capture time when at least half the photos carry one. When most files have lost their EXIF (a WhatsApp export, a photographer's stripped JPEGs), the shot counter in the filename is used instead, which keeps a camera's frames in the order they were taken. **Chapters are built from content, not just time.** A vision model writes a short description of each photo, those descriptions are embedded and clustered, and a text model reviews the clusters, merging ones that are clearly the same session. The default aims for three to eight chapters. In the editor you can ask for fewer or more chapters, a single chapter, or chapters by day, place or people, and the roll is regrouped. **Each chapter gets a hero and a title.** The strongest frame in each chapter is chosen by a vision model with your brief as context; it opens the chapter full-bleed. Titles and captions are drafted from the brief you write, so names and places are yours, not guesses. A cover is picked from across the album, preferring sharp frames with people in them that survive a square crop. None of this is final. The chapters, the picks and the titles are a draft you review before any page is laid out, and every spread is editable before you approve. See [how it works](https://makealbum.com/how-it-works) for the sequence and [the examples](https://makealbum.com/examples) for the result on the page. ## A workable plan for this weekend 1. Decide the page count first. For a two-week trip, 26 to 40 pages. 2. Write a short brief: who was there, where you went, the dates, anything the titles should get right. 3. Upload the whole roll. Do not pre-select; the filter is built for the bursts and the screenshots. 4. Review the chapters. Rename them, move a photo or two, swap a hero if you disagree. 5. Approve. Production typically takes 4 to 6 working days, delivery inside the EU 2 to 4 more. The two thousand photos stay where they are. The book is the sixty that matter, in order, with the names right. For a trip photographed on a phone, the [travel photo book](https://makealbum.com/photo-book/travel) page covers the specifics, including chapters by place from GPS.