# The Photo Book Assistant

The photo book wizard has several tabs that govern the settings for the current photo book.

## Images

The "Images" tab takes you to an image file browser where you can select images and/or directories. You can use the browser to define the specific product properties for the photo book, such as the cover type, the average number of images per photo book page, and the number of pages required in the photo book.
(For billing and production reasons, the page number is configurable between 26 and a maximum of 130 pages in steps of 8.)
After selecting the images for the photo book, the Assistant will calculate the optimum number of pages and the average number of images per page.

If you select more images than will fit in the photo book with the number of images per page and the number of pages you have chosen, the Photo Book Assistant will automatically discard some images. The settings for this are available in "Automatic image selection".

Clicking "Show grouping" lets you see which images the Assistant has chosen. This view gives you a preview of the groups to which the Assistant has assigned the images. The selected images are checked and can be removed from the selection using the drop-down menu (right mouse button) or the trash can icon.

You can set the grouping options in the corresponding tab. (See below.)
Of course you can manually reinsert any images that are removed, or remove any images you do not want, as well as changing the size and order of the images in the photo book.

The capacity bar on the right indicates how full the photo book is; any remaining space is shown in white, and red indicates images which the Assistant has automatically discarded.

## Background

These options control the automatic selection of backgrounds for photo book pages. They can be selected individually or combined.

The photo book Assistant chooses backgrounds based on the options you have enabled.

"black" and "white" – This is where you select whether the Assistant should use black and/or white backgrounds.

If you prefer not to use a black background, but don’t mind white, just check "white".

"Own images as background" – If you enable this option, one of the images is used as the background whenever a group fills a double page spread (see the next tab but one).

The pale, medium to light, and strong backgrounds are multicolor backgrounds which are available in 36 different hues and color scales.

The photo book Assistant attempts to select a background hue to match the colours in the images.

If you do not select any options, a white background will be used for all the pages in the photo book.

You can manually customize or replace the backgrounds for each page or double page spread later on.

## Layout

This is where you select how the photo book Assistant should arrange the images on a photo book page by preference.

Note the sample images.

If you enable the "Use maximum space ..." the photo book page will be filled with images as far as possible (at least 80%).

If you want to add text manually, the "Loose distribution..." option is preferable. This will give you sufficient space to move the images and insert text boxes.

If you prefer not to have your images organized in rows and columns, use the option "overlapping, tilted". This gives you a more informal arrangement of images.

The "Panorama images" option takes special layouts for images with extreme formats (16:9 or more) into consideration.

Later on, you can modify the layouts manually, move, scale and rotate images, and, if images overlap, decide which image is in front of which other image.

## Grouping

Setting this option defines how images are sorted and grouped.
Images can be grouped chronologically (by event) or by filename.

In case of chronological grouping the images can be grouped either by short or long events.

Short events are best suited for vacations or celebrations. Groups are created to allow a maximum interval of 10 minutes between 2 images.
The idea is: a new group is created each time the camera is switched on.

Longer events are suitable for annuals, baby books etc. where photos are taken sporadically. The maximum interval between 2 images in the same group is 5 days.

"Organize by filename" is suitable for images that are nicely sorted on disc, or for images which were not taken with a digital camera (scanned images, images from a CD etc., that is typically analog photos that have been digitized).
Grouping and sorting is alphabetic by directory name and then by filename.

Tip: Let’s assume you have directory called "France" with images titled "img1004", "img1005", and "img1006" – and you have a directory called "Asia" with images "pic1100", "pic1101", and "pic1102"; the images are first grouped by directory, and the group with the "pic..." images occurs before the group with the "img..." images although "i" comes before "p" in the alphabet. If you would like to sort the directories (and thus the image groups in a different order, because you visited France before you went to Asia, simply rename the directories by prepending a number, that is, "1France" and "2Asia". In this case, the images from the "1France" occur before the images from "2Asia" in the photo book because "1" comes before "2".

## Automatic image selection

Sets the options for discarding similar, out of focus, poorly exposed and/or pale images. This is relevant when you want or need to discard images.

## Create Photo Book

The "Create photo book" button launches the photo book Assistant and automatically adds the images, layouts, and backgrounds to the photo book.

You can now customize the automatically generated photo book to match your own needs. See the Chapter "Photo book" for details.

## Notes on the Photo Book Assistant

The photo book assistant is a tool designed to help users automatically generate a photo book quickly and easily. Once the Assistant has finished laying out your book you can easily customise it manually later on.