How to make a printable photo album

You need a desktop browser and a folder of photos. Chrome or Edge give the fullest experience, because the file-writing features rely on the File System Access API, which Firefox and Safari do not implement. Everything else — importing, organising, laying out and exporting the PDF — works in any modern browser.

If you intend to print at home, have card stock ready. Ordinary copier paper works for proofs but photos on 200–250 gsm matte or satin card look dramatically better and survive handling.

Open the tool and click Choose Photo Folder. Your browser asks you to pick a directory and to confirm that the page may read it. Subfolders are included, so pointing at a year's worth of monthly folders works fine.

In Chrome and Edge this uses the directory picker, which also grants the write permission needed later if you decide to reorganise the folder. Other browsers fall back to a read-only picker, and the tool hides the disk-writing features. There is also an "Open read-only instead" link if you would rather not grant write access at all.

Files the tool cannot display — text files, videos, RAW images — are counted rather than treated as errors, and reported after the scan.

Each photo goes through the same pipeline:

• EXIF metadata is read for capture time, camera and orientation. Capture time matters: file dates change when files are copied, so a folder copied off an SD card yesterday would otherwise all be dated yesterday.
• A thumbnail is generated at around 360 pixels and kept for the interface, so the editor never holds thousands of full-resolution images in memory.
• A SHA-256 hash of the file bytes identifies exact duplicates.
• A perceptual hash reduces the image to a 64-bit fingerprint that survives resizing and re-compression, which is what finds near-duplicates.
• A quality score combines sharpness, exposure, resolution and uniqueness.

This runs in parallel across your CPU cores in Web Workers, so the interface stays responsive and you can cancel at any point. Two thousand photos typically finish in well under a minute.

There are two separate review screens, because they solve different problems.

Exact duplicates

These are byte-identical files — the same photo copied into two folders, or imported twice. Matching is on the file hash, so there are no false positives. Each group keeps one photo; the rest are marked redundant and dropped from the album.

Similar and burst shots

These are photos that merely look alike: the eleven frames of the same jump, or the same view shot at three exposures. Grouping compares perceptual hashes within a sliding window of nearby capture times, so it stays fast on large folders and does not accidentally group two similar sunsets from different holidays.

The highest-scoring shot in each group is pre-selected. Click any other frame to choose it instead — the suggestion is only a suggestion.

Each event group gets a set of suggested highlights. The score behind them weighs four things:

No score understands whether a photo matters to you, so treat this as a first pass. Add and remove freely.

Choose what goes in:

• Suggested highlights — the automatic picks.
• Your current selection — whatever you ticked while browsing.
• Date events — pick whole days or individual events within a day, with either highlights only or every photo.

Then choose a card size. This is a physical measurement, not a pixel size — 76.2 mm square is a common scrapbook card, and standard photo sizes are offered too. Pages are generated chronologically, one per event, and a collage layout is picked to suit how many photos landed on each.

In the album editor you can:

• Reorder pages, retitle them, or delete them.
• Swap the collage layout for any other that fits the photo count.
• Replace, remove or add photos in individual frames.
• Zoom and drag inside a frame to set the crop.
• Rotate in 90° steps.
• Apply a look — colour grading such as a warm fade or black and white, with a strength slider.

You can also load your own .cube LUT file if you have a film-emulation pack you have licensed. The same grading maths runs in the preview and in the PDF, so what you see is what prints.

The print screen decides how cards are arranged on a sheet. Set paper size (A4 or US Letter), orientation, margins, the gap between cards, and the padding inside each card. The tool works out how many fit per sheet and previews the imposition.

Read the DPI report

This is the setting most worth your attention. The report tells you the effective resolution of each photo after cropping, at the size it will actually print:

Because the figure is computed after the crop, zooming far into a photo will drop its rating. That is correct: zooming throws pixels away.

Printer settings that matter

• Turn off "fit to page" / "scale to fit". This is the single most common cause of cards printing at the wrong size. Print at 100%.
• Choose the correct paper type so the printer lays down the right amount of ink.
• Print one proof page on plain paper before committing card stock.

Export renders each card from your original files, not from the on-screen thumbnails, at exact physical dimensions with trim marks at the corners. Download it or open it straight into your printer dialog.

The same album and settings always produce the same PDF, which makes reprinting a single sheet predictable.

If you own a Silhouette CAMEO or Portrait, the tool can put registration marks on the sheet and give you a matching cut file, so the machine trims every card.

1. Turn on print-and-cut in the print settings. The printable area shrinks to leave room for the marks.
2. Export and print the PDF at 100% scale.
3. Export the cut file and open it in Silhouette Studio.
4. Enable registration marks in Studio and enter the same three values shown in the tool.
5. Load the printed sheet, let the machine find the marks, and cut.

A calibration sheet is available to settle the exact mark geometry for your machine in a single test print.

The booklet layout needs no cutting at all. It rearranges the same album pages so that printing both sides of each sheet, folding the stack in half and nesting the sheets produces a small book that reads in the right order.

• The fold decides the page size. It always halves the sheet's longer side, so A4 landscape gives A5 portrait pages.
• Books work in fours. A short album is padded with blank pages at the end, never before your content.
• Duplex. Pages come out of the PDF front, back, front, back. For manual duplex, print the odd sheets, flip the stack, and print the even ones — test with two sheets before running the whole book.

This is optional, off by default, and the only feature that writes to your computer. It renames photos by capture date and files them into folders per event — 2026-03-14 Morning/2026-03-14_0812_IMG_1234.jpg — so any file browser sorts them chronologically.

Two modes:

• Copy (the default) writes renamed copies and leaves your originals untouched. Deleting the new folder undoes it.
• Move relocates the originals. It requires typing a confirmation word and writes an undo manifest into the folder.

You see every single before-and-after path before anything happens. RAW files are filed into their own RAW/ folders alongside the JPEG they were shot with, and videos into VIDEO/. Nothing is ever deleted: photos you remove are moved to a _deleted/ folder, because a browser cannot use the operating system's recycle bin and a permanent erase would be unforgiving.