# A travel photo book of Portugal: Lisbon, the Algarve and the north, in order > How a Portugal trip stays in the order you travelled from GPS and time, what the brief adds so the album title uses real names, and how many pages it needs. Source: https://makealbum.com/blog/travel-photo-book-portugal-lisbon-algarve-north · MakeAlbum, Lisbon, Portugal 2026-09-04 · MakeAlbum team · 6 min read --- 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 follows a route. This article walks through a typical ten-day route, how the book comes out of the photos, what to write in the brief, and how big the book should be. ## Let the geography keep the order 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 stay together, and the pages follow the order you travelled in. There are no chapter pages breaking up the run: the book goes from the first morning to the last evening as one story. Take a route of three nights in Lisbon, four on the Algarve and three in the north. The book runs in the order it was shot: - **Lisbon.** Alfama, the miradouros, Belém, a day trip to Sintra. The Sintra day sits between the city days where it happened, its photos side by side. - **Algarve.** Lagos, the Ponta da Piedade cliffs, the Benagil caves, an afternoon at Sagres. Each stop keeps its frames together, so the caves are not interrupted by a beach from the day before. - **Porto and the Douro.** The Ribeira, the wine lodges across the river in Gaia, a day up the valley to Pinhão. The Douro day follows Porto, as it did on the trip. Photos without GPS, from a camera or a phone with location off, fall back to capture time and content for their place in the book. A camera carried alongside the phone lands in the right place as long as its clock was set. The [travel photo book](https://makealbum.com/photo-book/travel) page describes this flow in general; here it is applied to one country. ## A loop or a stay A trip that moves reads as a route: the book turns from Lisbon to the coast to the north as you did. A trip that stays put reads as a run of days: a week in one Algarve villa with excursions becomes Monday at the beach, Tuesday in Tavira, Wednesday on the boat, in that order. There is nothing to set either way; the capture times decide. What you do decide is the size. A 26-page book holds the best of a ten-day loop; 78 pages leave room for every day of it. The [page count article](https://makealbum.com/blog/how-many-photos-for-a-photo-book) explains how many photos each size takes. ## What to write in the brief The brief is a free-text field on the album page, up to 4,000 characters. Our AI reads it when it chooses and when it drafts the album title, 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 a title will otherwise say "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 title the place names spelled as you want them, the dates and the people. Write it before you build the book, since the title is drafted then; you can ask our AI for fresh title suggestions afterwards, and each one reads the brief again, or type your own. 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 The book opens on the title page and runs straight into the photographs. Portugal gives the curation easy full-page frames: the tiled facade, the view from a miradouro, the cliffs at Ponta da Piedade, the Ribeira from the bridge. Around them, 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 stop is the right amount; a whole page of them reads as a catalogue. The [examples](https://makealbum.com/examples) include a Lisbon weekend laid out this way, the riverside and the old streets. ## 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, and costs €225 with shipping included. A 26-page book of about 60 photos, the best of each region, costs €199 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](https://makealbum.com/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](https://makealbum.com/photo-book/delivery) page has the specifics; from the United States, the [US delivery](https://makealbum.com/photo-book/delivery-united-states) 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. Check the favourites our AI hearted, add the frames you would be sad to miss, pick 26 or 50 pages and build the book. 4. Flip through it, swap any photo, switch the look if another suits the trip, 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.