I have a large number of photos edited and ready to go and want to then them into an album. Does anyone have any recommendations for any FOSS software that I can use to arrange the images to pages, and add text?

I intend to send the data to a professional printer for printing and binding.

My first thought was Libre Office’s Draw, but maybe this community has something more appropriate.

  • hedgehog
    4·
    5 months ago

    Are you familiar with LaTeX? You can use plugins that generate PDFs that follow the PDF/X1-a standard and send the resulting PDFs to professional printers.

    TeXStudio is a FOSS LaTeX editor that looks well-suited for your use-case.

    Since LaTeX documents are just text and your images are already sorted and so on, you could even write a script to construct the first draft of your doc with the pictures arranged consistently, based off the files in your file system, then edit it to tweak it to perfection. You could also/alternatively create or use some reusable LaTeX patterns.

    • Oneser@lemm.eeOP
      2·
      5 months ago

      Thanks for the suggestion, I started looking into LaTeX during my studies but never went through with learning it. Others have suggested Scribus, is there a reason why you might opt for LaTeX over that for this case?

      • hedgehog
        2·
        5 months ago

        I haven’t worked with Scribus but I’ve heard good things about it, so I don’t think you’d be making a wrong choice by going with it. For this use case, the main reasons I can think of for why LaTeX would be preferable would be:

        • if you preferred working with it, or with a particular LaTeX tool
        • if you want to learn one tool or the other
        • if being able to write a script to create the output is something you want to do and the equivalent is not possible in Scribus