I helped my grandma make a physical book of her treasured pictures. Now I will sit with you and help you make yours.
Hers sits on the shelf now, ready for a trip down memory lane whenever somebody picks it up. The Screen-by-Screen Walkthrough is a set of short videos, about two minutes each, and every one covers a single step.
The good part
Most people enjoy this more than they expect to.
Photographs on a phone are stored rather than seen. You scroll past them, and the years go by, and you never sit down with them properly. Making a book gives you a reason to, and the sitting down turns out to be the best of it.
You will spend a few evenings going back through your own life. There will be photographs in there you have not thought about in twenty years. Some of them you will not be able to place at first, and then you will.
Then you choose which ones go in, whose face gets a whole page, and what the caption underneath says. You are the only one who knows some of it. That is what your family will still have in forty years.
Where people get stuck
You have probably already found that the hard part is not the first day. It is the second one.
You put the book down for a few months, and when you come back you cannot remember how to move a photograph across the page. So you go looking on the internet for the answer, and you lose the afternoon.
Nothing is wrong with you. Mixbook, the website that makes and mails the printed book, was built for somebody who opens it every week. There are seven separate sections down the left side of the screen before you have even started.
The Screen-by-Screen Walkthrough works the other way round. It picks the size and the layout for you. It also stays put, so in five months you can go straight back to the one video you need.
What you get
Get your photos out of your phone and your folders and into a book your family will sit down with.
Here is what you will be able to do.
The choices are already made for you
I pick one size, one layout and one simple design, and you use those. You are not asked to look through seven hundred themes or work out what a background is for. If you want to change something later, you can, but you do not have to decide anything to get started.
Your photos will end up in the right order
Pictures arrive out of order, especially the ones your family sends you, and scanned pictures often carry the wrong date. There is a step for sorting this out before you place a single photograph. Skipping it is what costs people a whole afternoon.
Your captions will say what you meant them to say
You write them yourself, about people you actually know. Text boxes are the fiddly part, so they get a video of their own. It covers the fonts, the dragging, and the squashing them to fit. And if you would rather not fight with them at all, there is another way. Leave the space empty, and write the caption in by hand once the book arrives.
You will not lose your place, this year or next
Every step is its own short video, with its own plain name. You are never hunting through a long recording for the forty seconds you needed. Put the book down for six months and come back, and finding your way again takes a minute instead of an afternoon.
You do not need any of this.
You do not need to scan a box of old photographs first. The pictures already on your phone or your computer are plenty to start with. Scanning a shoebox is its own long project, and I would not begin there.
There is no need for any experience with design programs, and you do not need a second device or a tablet. Everything happens on your laptop. The very first video sets you up with two tabs, one for the video and one for Mixbook. It also shows you how to move between them.
You do not have to do it all at once, either. Set it down for a month and come back, and you will not have to work out where you got to.
And you do not have to decide about any of this from a web page. Watch a free sample video, see whether my pace suits you, and go from there.
This is probably for you if some of this sounds familiar.
Your phone and your computer between them hold years of family photographs, and they are not doing much good where they are.
You opened one of these websites once, saw how much of it there was, and closed it again. Or you found a video about it that went too fast and skipped the part where you were actually stuck.
You would like a project. Something to work at on a Saturday and hand to somebody when it is finished.
Who made this
My grandma has a phone full of photographs, and boxes more in the closet. She had been meaning to put them into a book for a long time.
She is better with a computer than she gives herself credit for. What stopped her was never the first afternoon. It was the fifth month. She would come back to it and have to work out all over again how to move a picture across a page.
I am Juliann, and I live in Iowa. I sat next to her and we went through Mixbook together, one screen at a time. She has a finished photo book now, and I wrote down every click that got her there.
What I understood, watching her, is that nothing on that screen was built for a first time. All of it assumed you had used it last week.
You did not grow up with this. That is not the same thing as being behind, and it is not something you have to catch up on. You just need somebody sitting next to you.
So I recorded it at the speed of the actual clicking, and I do not skip the small steps.
JuliannIowa
What about letting Mixbook do it for you?
Mixbook can now offer to build a book for you from a sentence or two of description, and it will make a fair job of the arranging. What it cannot do is tell you who anybody is. It does not know which trip everybody still talks about, or that the woman on page four is your sister.
That part was always going to be yours to write. And a book somebody else assembled does not help you the next time, when you want to make one again and have forgotten where to start.
Before you decide
A few plain answers before you decide.
- What am I actually buying?
- A set of short videos, about two minutes each. You watch them as often as you like, and stop and start wherever you want.
- What does it cost?
- $47, paid once. It is not a subscription, and your card will not be charged again.
- What if it turns out not to suit me?
- You have thirty days. Try it, and if you do not like it, write to me and I will refund the whole amount.
- Who takes the payment?
- Stripe, which handles card payments for a great many websites. Your card details go to them and not to me.
- How long can I use it?
- For as long as you like. You pay once and it stays yours, which matters if you come back to the book a few times a year.
- What if I get stuck?
- There is a question box underneath every step, so you can ask right where you got stuck rather than starting an email from scratch. You can also write to help@grandmahelper.com.
- Do I need anything other than my laptop?
- No. A laptop on its own is all you need. The first video shows you how to keep the video in one tab and Mixbook in the other. You are never trying to squeeze two things onto one screen.
- What does the printed book cost?
- That part is separate, and you pay Mixbook rather than me. A small softcover starts at about fifteen dollars, and a large hardcover runs fifty dollars or more, depending on the size and the number of pages. Mixbook runs sales often, so it may well come to less than that.
- Do you work for Mixbook?
- No. I am not connected to them in any way, and I do not get anything if you order a book.
How it goes
Here is what this looks like in practice.
It is a Saturday morning, with your coffee next to the laptop. You play the next video, switch to the other tab, and get one more pair of pages done. You type the caption underneath, and you do not have to go looking anything up.
Some weeks later the box arrives. The book is heavier than you expected, and everything written in it is in your own words. The next time the grandkids are over, one of them takes it off the shelf. You sit down beside them and tell them who everybody is.
There is no hurry about any of it. This is a project rather than an errand, and most people work at it over a few weekends. The Screen-by-Screen Walkthrough will be there whenever you pick it up again.
$47 one payment
Lifetime access. Thirty days to change your mind.
Or watch a free sample video and see whether my pace suits you.