Primary school yearbooks - recommendations for an easy online tool / platform?

[custardlover]

Does anyone have any recommendations for an online platform or a good resource to get templates to create a primary school leavers yearbook please?

I feel sure that this is not a new problem to solve and there must be some great wisdom out there from those who have done it in the past. A quick, cursory search shows me a lot of printing companies. I'm very happy to go with one of them but if there are recommendations on any that people have used before, I'll be really grateful.

I am not a graphic designer! Thanks in advance.

(Just adding this to the list of millions of things to do for the end of the school year including the fair and the show and the week-long trip and and and - being a class rep in year 6 is a hard Do Not Recommend)

Realise this is not the sexiest of topics but I would really be grateful for any tips and recommendations so bumping...

The printing companies offering year books all have templates. Work out how many books you need, your budget then Google y6 years books and pick a company. It's probably a bit late now to request sample etc. If you want photos only them standard photo book companies should be enough.
I did our y6 leavers a few years ago. If you want to drop me a PM I'm happy to dig out who we used but I can't remember off the top of my head.

Oh and delegate, delegate, delegate.

We had lots of parents involved in different aspects of the end of y6 not some poor class rep doing it all.

Don't do it! Honestley, it was an absolute disaster and the comments we got in the end about the chosen photos we included.

But - if you want to/need to:
We used the same company previous years used and parents commented positively about the quality. They will tell you what format the file has to have they are printing then.
We were also were lucky that one dad was a graphic designer and did the cover for us. So do ask for help.

We had each child provide a headshot and a TA did a questionaire with them about
a)where are they going now
b) what was their best experience at primary
c) what do they want to do in the future

We also asked parents for photos they took during events but it was then that we were told we couldn't include mixed year groups or any child, even in the background, that wasn't part of the class.
So the school luckily came back and helped with photos they took during trips and in-class.

The head and both year teachers wrote a letter we included.

We didn't get permission from the person who did the Y6 school group photos to use them so the teachers did two group photos themselves. The previous company who did the Reception one was happy to allow us to use them.

We worked 5 months on that bl**dy thing. It was really nice in the end but DH (who did the formatting and liaised with the printers) and the other 4 of us who did the legwork opened a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the end of that project.

Oh god I am somewhat stressed now!

We have (most of) the content I think - a profile photo has been submitted for each child by their parents, each child has written their own biography (some of them are hilarious!) and we have a lot of both submitted photos from the parents and the group photos, with permissions, from the school.

Letters from the head and each of the class teachers is such a lovely idea, I will ask for those too, thank you.

The cover is being designed by the kids as an end-of-term art project - they each have a square in which they can do a self-portrait.

So it's really the design of the interiors we need to sort now. There doesn't seem to be an easy template that past years have used, they tend to have been designed by helpful professional parents and we don't have anyone with the right skills putting themselves forward so it's going to be me with my GCSE art 30ish years ago I think 😬

Canva.

It has millions of templates and you can print through there too.