By Charlotte Reeves

Designing albums for my clients is something I love to do - there's just something special about a beautiful collection of images that tell the full story of the photo session.

Smart Albums makes it super quick and easy to design layouts, with many templates to choose from. Just import the images, then drag the images into a spread. The app will automatically arrange them using one of the templates - often it does such a good job you can accept it and move onto the next spread!

If you want to tweak the spread, scroll through the available templates to select a new one. Then click and drag to swap images around within the spread. If images need straightening or cropping within the frame, that's quick and simple to do as well.

This 10-spread album design of Django the Koolie took around 12 minutes to create. The video is sped up 4x so you can see the entire process, then I share the resulting album flip-through at the end.

Handy hint

When designing spreads, select images that are similar in some way, so the layout looks cohesive. Matching the lighting and/or location, the activity, or the scale of the dog in the frame, all help to make the spread look consistent and professional.