25 July 2026
Loose prints, an album you fill yourself, a drag-and-drop photobook, or something automatic. Four quite different products that end up in the same place on the shelf.
Printing a year of photos sounds like one decision. It is really a choice between four different products that happen to end up in the same place on the shelf.
The four options
Loose prints in a box
The cheapest and most flexible route. Real photographs, you can put them anywhere, and a hundred of them costs around fifteen pounds.
The trouble is that a box of prints is not an object anyone picks up. It goes in a drawer and stays there. A box of prints is storage, and you already have storage.
An album you fill yourself
A proper album with sleeves or corners. These look lovely, they last decades, and putting one together is genuinely enjoyable if you are the sort of person who enjoys that.
Be honest with yourself about finishing it. The common outcome is that the album gets bought, the prints get ordered, about thirty pages get done, and the whole lot lives on top of the wardrobe with an envelope tucked inside. If you know you finish things, this is the nicest option there is.
A drag-and-drop photobook
How most of the big services work. You upload, pick a template, and lay the pages out yourself. The results can be excellent and you keep complete control.
What it costs you is time. Laying out forty pages properly takes most people an evening or two, and the software is usually clunky enough that you feel every minute. There is also a specific trap waiting: you sit down to make a book about last year and spend the first hour just deciding which photos to use, which is the genuinely hard part and the bit no template helps with.
An automatic photobook
Something else picks the photos and lays out the pages, and you review it. This is what we make, so weigh what follows accordingly.
It suits people with thousands of photos and no spare evenings. It suits you considerably less if you have a specific book in your head already, because you are handing the editing to something that does not know the slightly blurry one matters because of who is in it.
What to actually look for
Whichever way you go, these are what separate a book that gets kept from one that does not:
- Paper weight. Below about 150gsm the pages feel flimsy and you can see the next page through them. 170gsm and up feels like a book.
- Hardcover over softcover. Softcovers curl. A hardcover survives being handled by children, which is the entire point of making one.
- Lay flat binding, if the photos matter more than the price. It means a photo across two pages is not eaten by the spine. Worth paying for on a wedding book, less critical on a family yearbook.
- Size. Bigger is not better. An eight inch square book gets picked up and passed around. A twelve inch one lives on a shelf and gets opened twice.
- Whether delivery is included in the price you were quoted. Very often it is not, and it is rarely small.
How many photos for a year
Somewhere between 150 and 250. Below a hundred a whole year feels thin and you notice the gaps. Above three hundred and people stop turning pages.
What matters more than the number is the spread. A book where June and July take up half the pages is not a book about a year, it is a book about a holiday. Working month by month instead of event by event fixes it, and it is probably the single biggest improvement most people could make to their photobooks.
What we make
Our yearbook is £39.99 with UK delivery included. 48 pages, eight inches square, soft matte hardcover, 170gsm silk paper. It is not lay flat, which is the honest trade-off at that price.
The app reads your camera roll, scores the photos and picks up to 240 of the best across the year you choose, spread across it rather than bunched around the holidays. You can swap anything before you order, change the title and choose a cover colour. It needs about thirty photos to work at all and looks properly good from around a hundred and fifty.
One book per order, and iPhone only at the moment.