How to make a photo book on your phone and print it at a photo shop

What the photo shop needs from you

• One PDF with every page in order. A shop can print loose photos from a folder, but a book needs its pages laid out first.
• The page size: 4R (4 × 6 inches, about 10 × 15 cm, the size of a regular photo print) or A4 (21 × 29.7 cm, the size of a sheet of printer paper).
• Your choice of paper, glossy or matte, and of binding, such as stapled, spiral or hard bound. Ask what the shop offers, and what it costs, before it prints.
• How many copies you want.

The quick way, with Yaadgaar

1. 1

   Put the photos in one album

   Start a circle and add your photos. The others in the circle add theirs, from their phones and straight from WhatsApp. Each photo is filed under the month it was taken.

2. 2

   Choose the photos

   Tap Make yaadein on a card under “Days worth keeping”, such as a festival just gone, a trip or last month. Or press and hold months on the Timeline. Tap any photo to leave it out.

3. 3

   Pick the paper

   Under Paper choose 4R or A4, pick a cover, and tap Make yaadein. The app lays out the pages: the cover, a title page, then one photo to a page, oldest first, with photos taken sideways paired two to a page.

4. 4

   Save the PDF

   Open the yaadein’s menu and tap Save. The first time, choose a folder on your phone; the PDF is saved there.

5. 5

   Send it to the shop

   Send the PDF to the photo shop on WhatsApp, or copy it to a pen drive, and tell them the size: 4R or A4.

What the pages look like

The month a photo was taken sits in a ribbon in the corner of its page. The cover and the title page carry the words “Made with Yaadgaar”; the photo pages do not.

Photos are kept at up to 2,400 pixels on the long side. On a 4R page, a photo that fills the width is about 790 pixels across, roughly 200 to the inch. That is fine for a book this size. For a big print on a wall, use the original photo from the phone that took it.

Doing it without Yaadgaar

First collect everyone’s photos in one place: ask for them on WhatsApp, or use a shared album. Then lay out the pages in a design app, one page at a time, and save a PDF in the size the shop prints. It works; it takes longer, because you place every photo yourself.

Some printing services take your photos online and send the finished book to your home. Then there is no shop to visit and no file to carry.

4R or A4?

• 4R is the size of a regular photo print, so the book feels like an album of prints, small enough to pass round.
• A4 is the size of a sheet of printer paper. The photos are bigger, and so is the book.