Photo albums and prints, and why families still order them

By Elena · Cup of Green Photography · Caterham, Surrey

Every session I photograph comes with the whole gallery, colour-corrected and finished in my style, and almost all of it will live on a phone. That's fine, right up until the moment it isn't. This is what happens when you put photographs on paper instead, how the albums and books I sell are made, and why the families who order them say the same thing afterwards.

Why families order them at all

Three reasons come up again and again, and only one of them is about the object.

The first is that a printed album can't fail. A USB stick in a drawer isn't a plan: flash memory degrades when it sits unpowered, file formats move on, laptops get replaced and cloud accounts lapse when a card expires. Nothing about an album needs a password, a cable or a subscription. You pick it up and it works.

The second is that the photographs get seen. Nobody scrolls back eight hundred days to find the good one from that afternoon in the park. An album on a shelf gets pulled down on a wet Sunday, and children treat it as a toy in the best way, telling you who everyone is and what happened next.

The third is the long one. A properly made album is designed for a hundred years and more, so the person it really belongs to might be someone who hasn't been born yet.

What "fine art" and "archival" really mean

Those two words get used loosely, so here is what they mean on mine. The pages are printed with pigment inks onto matte fine art papers, including cotton rag stocks, rather than the dye-based printing a high street lab uses. The boards, glues and cover materials are museum grade. All of it is chosen so the album will not yellow, fade or go brittle the way a supermarket photo book does after a few summers on a windowsill.

The other thing worth knowing is that the materials are sourced sustainably, and wherever possible they are 100% recycled. I did check, because it would be an odd thing to sell heirlooms made carelessly.

How your album is made

They are hand-bound in Yorkshire, which is the part I like telling people. Hand-bound isn't a flourish in the copy: the pages are assembled and the covers are made by people, in small numbers, to order.

Two details matter more than they sound. The pages open completely flat, with an almost invisible crease down the middle, so a photograph can run right across a spread without anybody losing their face in the gutter. And in a matted album, each print is mounted underneath a precision-cut bevelled mat, so every page is six hand-assembled layers and roughly 2.5mm thick. You feel the difference the first time you turn one.

The four kinds, and who picks which

There's no single album. There are four, and the differences are real rather than marketing.

• The straightforward one. Ten to twenty-five spreads, matt fine art paper, natural open-weave fabric covers and a set choice of cover text, in 6x6, 8x8 or 10x10 inches. Fewer decisions, lower price, same binding and the same paper quality as the rest.
• The fine art album. The heirloom. Ten to fifty spreads, sizes from 6x6 up to 12x12 as well as A4 and A5, and covers in genuine leather, cotton, heritage fabric or silk. This is the one that takes engraving, foiling and gold.
• The coffee table book. A4 or A5 portrait with a matching slipcase, twenty-five spreads, a screen-printed cover and your own text down the spine. Designed to be left out and picked up rather than stored.
• The matted album. The traditional one, made with modern precision. Prints sit under bevelled window mats, in sizes up to 14x10, so each photograph gets looked at on its own terms instead of competing with the next one.

Covers, foiling, and the part where it becomes yours

This is the bit people enjoy far more than they expect to. Covers come in soft contemporary leathers in about twenty-five colours, 100% cotton in bold and quiet shades, a two-toned open-weave heritage fabric for anyone after something rustic and neutral, and silk if you want the album to look like an occasion.

Then you can mark it. Engraving uses a laser to lift the top layer of the material so the natural colour underneath shows through. Cover printing puts your text straight onto the material in black or white. Blind debossing presses the letters in with no ink and no foil at all, which is my favourite and the hardest to photograph. Foiling heat-presses gold or silver into the cover, and if only the real thing will do, there's 22 carat gold on leather. You can have a bespoke motif instead of text, choose the endpapers behind the cover, and put names, a date or something daft along the spine.

My honest advice: pick the material you want to touch, keep the text short, and don't agonise. A name and a year outlives a clever phrase.

Prints, boxes and the grandparent problem

Not everything needs to be an album. A print box holds ten fine art prints in a keepsake box for £195, which is the easiest thing in the world to hand over at Christmas, and the prints can come out and be framed whenever you like. Single prints are £35 each, any photograph from your gallery.

If you do order an album, you can add mini copies of it in smaller sizes. Same design, same pages, made for the people who will otherwise ask you to email them everything. There's also a clamshell box, which is a fitted case that protects the album and turns getting it out into a small event.

How it works with me

Albums and books start at £400, and that covers the design, the printing and delivery. I offer them once your gallery has landed, never while you're booking, because choosing a keepsake before you have seen a single photograph is a strange thing to ask of anyone.

It works the same whether the photographs came from a family session, a maternity or newborn morning or a small wedding. When you want one, you tell me the frames that have to be in it and anything you would rather leave out. I lay out the story from your gallery, send it to you, and we change whatever you want changed. Then it goes off to be made and it arrives at your door a few weeks later, hand-bound, in a box, absurdly heavy for its size.