The ordinary days are the ones you forget
Birthdays get photographed. Tuesdays get photographed too, and then never looked at again. Send us the year — all of it — and we will make the book you keep meaning to make.
Eleven thousand photographs, and none of them printed
Family photography is the extreme case of the problem. There is no gallery, no photographer, no obvious start and end — just a continuous stream, taken by three different people on four different devices, growing by two hundred pictures a month for as long as anyone can remember.
Which means the selection job is not merely tedious, it is genuinely enormous. It is also the one worth doing most, because these are the pictures nobody else has, and the ones children ask to see.
Three ways families use us
Baby's first year
Twelve months, usually two to three thousand photographs, made into a single book. Nearly always ordered in threes — one for the house and one for each set of grandparents, from the same design.
The yearly book
Made every January, covering the year just gone. The most durable habit we see: after five or six of them the shelf itself becomes the thing, and the children go to it before they go to a screen.
The catch-up
Ten years, or twenty, in one go. Daunting to start and the most satisfying to finish. We break it into volumes so the work arrives in pieces you can react to rather than one impossible book.
What we do differently with family sets
- We keep the unflattering ones. The picture where nobody is looking at the camera and one child is mid-tantrum is the one that will be pointed at in fifteen years. Curating a family year only for the pretty frames produces a book nobody believes.
- We watch the balance. Left alone, most family albums end up being almost entirely about the youngest child, because that is who gets photographed. We count, and we tell you.
- Whoever took it, it goes in. Phone pictures, the grandparents' pictures, the school photographer's, the blurry video still. Mixed sources are normal; we handle the quality differences rather than rejecting files.
- Dates matter here. Unlike a wedding, a family book needs anchoring — months, ages, the odd caption. We will ask you for a handful of details and put them in quietly.
Which book
For a year of family photographs the Everyday Book is usually right: up to 130 pages, lighter in the hand, and priced so that making one every year is a habit rather than an event. For a first-year album that is going to grandparents, people often choose the Heritage Album instead — thicker pages, a quarter-inch cover, and one of the 53 cover materials with the child's name and year foiled on the front.
Grandparent copies
The same design in a smaller size, bound in the same run. The design work is only done once, so a copy costs a good deal less than the first book rather than the same again — three Heritage books come to $895, and an Everyday Book set is quoted for you before anything is printed. That is why families order the copies with the first book rather than afterwards, and why the first-year album has become the easiest Christmas present anybody in this house has ever bought.
Starting is deliberately small
Leave an email; a free private gallery arrives within minutes. Upload whatever you have — a phone export, a folder from a laptop, the shared album everyone in the family adds to. Tell us the period you want covered and who is in it. Within three to five working days you will have a designed book to look at, free, with no obligation to print it.
Two free things, before you decide anything
A private online gallery for your photographs, and a designed album to page through. Leave your email and we will send you a single upload link — your design follows in three to five working days.