If you’d like to make a suggestion, please comment below! The more specific and the more actionable your request, the more the likelihood of it being included. 
This will eventually work it’s way into being a tutorial. For now it is just notes.
Scribus wiki: tips on making a photo album
making a photobook using a script
automatic image import not requiring tkinter
High-level overview
- Choose book options: page size and number of pages, bleed, trim, margins, and gutter. Probably also an output color profile. Many of these parameters are supplied by your print vendor.
- Make some layouts. Store those layout in a Scribus Scrapbook, this will allow you to reuse layouts easily.
- Choose page layouts by applying the desired layout from a Scrapbook to a specific page.
- Import images. You can use a script if you have a lot of images (is this true?) or place them into the image frames by hand.
- Fine tune image position and caption.
To Do
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Sorting the photos: Using darktable, what I really miss is doing sorted collection as preparations for photo books. Of course I can add all images that may be used in the project into one collection by adding a tag, but there is no possibility to bring them into an arrangement that reflects their order in the book. (from @chris)
@paperdigits thoughts: Geeqie can apparently do this; need to look into it.
@Tobias has offered a possible darktable implementation here. I’d be happy to include this in the steps, but I’m not aware of a good solution to do this currently, other than numbering the files on the file system. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.
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Building reasonable page templates and working efficiently with them, especially with images and text. (from @chris)
@paperdigits thoughts: Yes, see the comments about Scrapbooks above. Scribus can export Scrapbooks.
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Aligning images into the template layout, especially if the box is fix and you want to shift your image around to see the best crop (as told before, this already improved a lot). (from @chris)
@paperdigits thoughts: Yes, will cover in Fine tune images above.
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Vertical text alignment. While this was implemented in scribus, I have no idea which version I have to install to get the feature, all that seem to be available precompiled for ubuntu seem to lack this feature. (from @chris)
@paperdigits thoughts: Yes, will cover in Fine tune images above. Vertical text alignment seems to be added in the 1.5.x development build.
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Export: How to maintain the book for print including bleed and have an PDF export without bleed? (from @chris)
@paperdigits thoughts: See File > Export (as PDF) > Pre-Press > Bleed Settings. Here you can see the Bleed to
0if you want to export a PDF with no Bleed, such as for posting to the web or for consumption that doesn’t require any sort of printer’s mark. -
Double-side spreads: In principle, these are simple in scribus, but for “lay-flat” photo books with, e.g., saal (a German supplier) an odd number of horizontal pixels is required if you want to upload image files instead of the PDF. That was driving me crazy (not a particular problem, but probably there’s a solution out there). (from @chris)
@paperdigits thoughts: This is usually pretty printer-specific, since you’ll need some of the image in the bleed (and you’ll have to be OK with loosing a bit of the image to the binding and such. I’m tempted to shy away from it for now because of the necessary specifics and the low margin for error to get something good looking.
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Not being a designer, I have to learn a lot to do a reasonable font choice, typography, layout (from @chris)
@paperdigits thoughts: I hope to provide some reasonable layouts via the Scrapbook feature. I can suggest fonts and general design patterns. I can include a few tasteful font styles along with the Scrapbook stuff.