Viovio Part I - Resizing your layouts

Viovio Part II - Uploading Your Pages

Viovio Part III - Creating your book and ordering

Alright, it seems enough of you are interested in getting help with Viovio. So, I’ll post as I go along… making a this a multi-part tutorial.

Viovio allows you to upload your 12×12 JPEG pages for any square photobook. So, if you have 12×12 pages and you want to print a 10×10 or 8.5×8.5, you CAN upload those 12×12’s and they will scale it down for you. The only problem with uploading your original pages is that you may have important things next to the edges that could get trimmed or lost in the gutter when your book is put together. So, you’re going to want to look through your pages and adjust any pages with text/titles/faces right against the edges. Another advantage of resizing is that Viovio only gives you 500 megs of free space, so if you size down for your books that aren’t 12×12, you won’t use as much of your Viovio disk space.

FULL BLEED: whenever you print books (or pages) the pages will get a little bit trimmed off each edge to make sure the image “bleeds” off the edge (so you won’t have any white edges and your image extends to the edges). Even the Costco photo lab does this, so this isn’t unique to photobooks.

GUTTER: When your pages are bound together, a little bit of one side of your page will get lost in the binding. My Viovio books lays pretty flat, so not a lot is lost, but you want to be sure your important stuff won’t get lost in the binding.

If some of your pages have nothing important near the edges, go ahead and upload those original full size JPEGs. I am super paranoid something important will get cut, so I open all my layered files and drag them to my Viovio template and resize/adjust.

You can download the Viovio templates I created here. I’m using the 10×10 template. It’s just a blank page with blue guides at 1/4 inch and at 3/8 inch from each edge. The 1/4 inch guide is for where they may actually CUT the pages. Only about 1/8 inch from each edge will get cut, but pages may shift so I put the potential “cut” guide at 1/4 inch. The next guide is the additional “danger” zone I include for the binding. Keep all text and important items out of the danger and cut zones. This will help ensure that you are happy with your book. But, if you use these templates and something gets trimmed, don’t blame me. I’m just trying to help. Just a note about the templates: you may notice that they are 12.25, 10.25, and 8.75 inches square. This is because they recommend uploading pages at this size because the pages will be trimmed to 12×12, 10×10, or 8.5×8.5… rather than 11.75×11.75, 9.75×9.75, and 7.75×7.75 like some other printers do. The Viovio 8×8 is actually 8.5×8.5, unlike other companies.

So, I open my original layered TIFF file and my Viovio template. I select everything in the layers palette by selecting the top layer, holding down SHIFT, the scrolling all the way to the bottom and clicking on the bottom layer. This will select all layers. Then I duplicate all these layers to my template file. Once everything is on the template, I hold down SHIFT and click on my background paper (and any other layers I want to bleed off the edge) on my canvas (hold down CTRL if you’re clicking on it in the layers palette) so that everything BUT the background is selected. Then I size my layers down so that everything is within the safe area. Then I’ll go resize the background paper so it fills the entire canvas because I want the background to bleed off the edge. Then I save this as a JPEG in my 2008 Viovio Book folder. Make sure you don’t overwrite your template file.

So, does that make sense?

Also, when I name my pages both as layered and JPEG files, I always name them like this: yyyy_mmdd_pagetitle (i.e. 2008_0106_alliesblessing.jpg). This way when I upload my files later to Viovio, they will automatically be put in chronological order. Otherwise, it will be a little harder to organize your book. You could also name them 001_name, 002_name, etc… but I like it to sort by date and since all my photos include the date info, I’ve always named my pages this way. I also like to name my files this way because I don’t always put dates on my layouts… so I’ll always know when the pictures were taken.

I know some people do not keep their layered files. If you don’t, then you can open any full size JPEG pages with stuff on the edges and duplicate it to your Viovio template and make sure the page is sized down to sit on the 1/4 inch edge. Then you can use your eyedropper to select the color of your background, then use your paint bucket and fill the layer below your page to fill the edges. You may have edges that aren’t trimmed exactly on that line, but at least the edge will blend with your page rather than getting white edges.

It sounds like a lot of work, but I resized 55 of my pages in one night. Now that I’m pretty sure I want to print my future books with Viovio, after I make a page, I immediately resize and adjust the page for Viovio so that when it comes time to print my next book, I won’t have to do anything to resize or fix margins.

I hope this helps! I’ll be back later when I move on to the next step (it may be a couple weeks since I am not done scrapping all the photos I want to be in the book).

Here’s an example of a page I had to adjust. My text was right on the edge. (Page credits here)

The resized, adjusted page: