Have Lightroom Layout My Book for Me?

Right under the Book Settings panel (in the right side Panels area) is the Auto Layout panel. It doesn’t look like much—just a single pop-up menu and a couple buttons. Click on the Preset pop-up menu and you’ll get a list of page layout presets (put there by Adobe, along with ones you create yourself). For example, the one named Left Blank, Right One Photo will create a book with every left page blank (duh), and every right page will automatically be filled with a single photo that fills the page to the side edges, as seen above (yes, it’s a pretty darn boring layout, but we’ll create our own later). The images appear in the order they appear in the collection you created, with the first image appearing on the cover and page 1, the second image on page 3 (remember, the second page is blank), and so on. If this seems kinda lame, it’s only because the presets are lame. When you get some decent looking layouts and create your own presets, this can be a really awesome starting place that gets you 90% of the way there with just one click.