# Turn your photos into a family album with Claude Two routes, both ending in a print-ready PDF. **Route 1: one trip**, from a shared Google Photos album, on any computer. **Route 2: a whole year**, from Apple Photos on a Mac. At the end, a tip for printing at Lupa. --- # Route 1: one trip, any phone I tested this route on our Italy trip: 308 photos and videos in a shared album, and 80 made the book. Here Claude looks at every photo, so it's built for a trip, not a whole year. You need the Claude desktop app on a paid plan (Code tab), on a Mac or Windows. 1. **Get the photos into one folder.** Everyone adds their photos to one shared Google Photos album. Open the album on your computer, the ⋮ menu, Download all, and unzip it. 2. **Ask for the plan.** Open that folder in Claude's Code tab and paste: ``` This folder has the photos from our trip to [place], from everyone's phones. Look at every photo and build me a plan for a printed album, as an HTML page I can open. Number every photo. Keep the best shot of each moment and cut the blurry, dark and near-duplicate ones. Make sure everyone in the family is in it. Group the pages by day, using the date inside each photo, and suggest a short title for each day. Under the plan, list what you cut and why. Skip the videos. Then wait for my changes. ``` 3. **Fix it by number.** "Swap 26 for 28." "Drop 100." "Give 88 its own page." 4. **Lay out the book.** When the plan is right, paste: ``` The plan is final. Lay it out as a print-ready photo book PDF: a cover with the best photo of everyone together, then the pages in the order of the plan, with the day titles. Clean layout, no cropped faces, no lonely photo floating on a page. Use the full-resolution photos for the print PDF, and also save a small copy for my phone. Show me the pages before you call it done. ``` Then send the PDF to any service that prints from a PDF. Videos can't print: ask Claude for a QR code to the album, for the last page. --- # Route 2: a whole year, on a Mac This is the exact approach I used to turn tens of thousands of photos into clean, year-by-year family albums — automatically picking the best shots and laying them out into a print-ready PDF. ## What you need - A **Mac**, with your photos in the **Apple Photos** app. - The **Claude desktop app** on a paid plan, in the **Code tab** (it needs permission to read your Photos library — it'll walk you through granting it). That's it. Paste the prompt below into the Code tab and answer the two questions it asks. ## Two tips before you start - **Tag a few faces in Apple Photos first.** The whole thing leans on Apple's face data — if your family isn't named in Photos, the picks will be weaker. - It takes roughly **30–60 minutes** to run on a large library. Let it work. --- ## The prompt (copy everything below) ``` You are my photo-book builder. Turn my Mac's Apple Photos library into a beautiful year-in-review photo book — one polished PDF per year I ask for — plus a small phone-friendly version. Setup: I'm on a Mac, my photos are in the Apple Photos app, and you have file + terminal access. You need to read my Photos library, which needs Full Disk Access for the app you're in (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access). If you can't read it, stop and tell me exactly how to grant it, then continue. Install what you need into a local Python virtualenv (osxphotos, Pillow, reportlab, pymupdf). Never move, edit, or delete my originals. First ask me: (1) which year to build, and (2) the names of my close family exactly as Apple Photos tags them. Then build the book: - Read every photo that year; drop screenshots, hidden photos, and videos. - Keep only photos where a family member's face is clear — eyes open, sharp, big enough to see (use Apple's own per-face quality and eye-state data). Toss dark, blurry, or looking-away shots. - Remove bursts and near-duplicates; keep the best of each moment. - Prefer people and gatherings; drop photos of just food, objects, or scenery. - Use Apple's scene tags to keep variety within each month — don't let it fill up with twenty near-identical restaurant or playground shots. - Balance ~15–25 great photos across every month so none is empty or over-stuffed. - Make sure each family member shows up a fair number of times, and give each kid a couple of solo moments too — not just the ones who photograph most. - Cover: the strongest shot with the whole family together, everyone facing the camera — never crop a face; if it's vertical, place it beside the title, don't stretch it. - One divider page per month using a bright, front-facing family photo (never crop faces), and name each month's highlight from Apple's own tags — holidays, trips, notable places — so it reads like "October · Halloween" or "August · Barcelona". - Clean editorial layout: justified rows, no cropping, fill each page, no lonely floating photos. - If my originals are in iCloud and not downloaded, use the high-res previews already on my Mac. Save a full-res print PDF and a ~6 MB phone version, and show me a contact sheet to approve. Work step by step, show progress, and ask before anything irreversible. ``` --- *When it's done, skim the contact sheet it shows you and tell it any photo or month you'd swap — it'll adjust. Then send the print PDF to a photo-book service (I used one that prints from a PDF) or keep the digital version.* --- # Pro tip: printing at Lupa Lupa won't print a PDF you made somewhere else. It only prints books built in its own editor. So keep the choosing, and swap the last step for these. It works for both routes. 1. **Export for Lupa.** Instead of the layout, paste: ``` Skip the layout. Copy the photos you picked, full resolution, as JPGs into one folder on my Desktop called Lupa, no subfolders. Keep each photo's original date and time inside the file, because Lupa sorts by it. Skip anything smaller than 800×800 pixels. Tell me how many photos went in. ``` 2. **Build it in Lupa.** On your computer: lupa.co.il in Chrome, the web version. Sign in, upload the Lupa folder, pick a format and run the smart auto design. Drag your cover photo on yourself. 3. **Titles and a last check.** With Claude in Chrome, paste: ``` Open the Lupa tab with my book. On the first page of each day (or each month, for a year book), add a short page title: 40 characters max, starting with a word, not a number. Then go through the book page by page and tell me which pages have a cut-off face or two near-identical photos. Don't touch the cart or the order. ``` 4. **Check every page, then order.** You sign in, you order, you pay. ## What I hit in Lupa - Photos with no date go to the end of the book. The export keeps the dates. - Lupa fills pages by count, not by day, so a few pages mix two days. - A title that starts with a number gets the number flipped to the end. Start with a word. - The full-bleed square cover crops faces. Pick a cover layout with a frame, then fix the crop. - Lupa's drag and drop didn't respond to Claude. Drag the cover and any swaps yourself. - A QR code in a 4:3 frame gets cut. Ask Claude for one padded to 4:3. Lupa takes 25 to 864 photos per book, each at least 800×800 pixels. Our Italy book: 80 photos, 40 pages. *The full page, in English and Hebrew: www.dagan.ai/photobook*