Create Tiny Photo Books in Minutes

I always hear people say, “print your work”, and while I regularly sift through my old images as part of an image ranking application I wrote (which I should also publish at some point), it would be nice having some physical artifacts which one can happen upon while cleaning or moving or otherwise going through old stuff. In my experience, loose photos tend to just become a cluttered mess, forever confined to the boxes they get eventually filed in. I tried making photo books, but usually the scope creep, the cost, the fear of missing something important, or “just wanting to fix that one additional thing before printing” leads to a lot of these large-scale projects of mine to be abandoned.

When I recently happened upon this YouTube video by Nick Gunn I felt inspired to create one of these lower-effort, quick-and-dirty photo zines¹. And while I liked the concept of the web application showcased in the video, there were some features I thought it was missing. Thus, armed with a soon-expiring claude code subscription, I created my own clone of that website! It’s a self-contained single-file single-page permissively licensed application and runs completely locally (so none of your pictures ever leave your computer). If you do enjoy it, feel free to Ctrl + S that page to get your very own local copy (in case I ever forget to pay the bills for this web server)!

Why then everybody, thank you very much for indulging me in telling this little story and start creating your own tiny photo book!