Why we built MakeAlbum.
Made in Lisbon, Portugal.
Most of us carry thousands of photos and almost never do anything with them. The moments are all there — but they sit in a feed that scrolls past, not on a shelf you can reach for.
The problem
A phone fills up faster than anyone has time to sort it. The good photographs drown in burst shots, near-misses, and three slightly different versions of the same frame. Turning that into an album by hand means an evening of scrolling, second-guessing, and giving up somewhere around page four.
So the album never gets made. The trip, the year, the people who were there — none of it leaves the camera roll.
What MakeAlbum does
MakeAlbum does the first hard pass for you. You hand over the whole messy dump, and an AI clears out the blurred frames and duplicates, curates the stronger photos, sequences them, and groups them into chapters with draft titles — a first draft of the story.
You stay in control the entire time. Nothing is printed until you have read through every spread and approved it. The AI gets you to a confident starting point; the final word is always yours.
How it works
- Upload the full dump — no need to pre-sort or pick favourites first.
- The AI builds chapters and a draft story from the stronger frames.
- You review and edit the chapters, titles, captions, photo choices, and the cover.
- You approve, and only then is the album printed and shipped.
What makes it different
- You approve every spread before anything goes to print — no surprises in the box.
- It is a real 300 × 300 mm lay-flat hardcover, not a flimsy softcover. Pages open flat so photos cross the spine without disappearing into the gutter.
- Your photos are never used to train AI models and are never sold or shared. The curation model was trained on a separate licensed photography corpus.
- It is made by a small independent team that actually answers email, usually within a business day.
Who’s behind it
MakeAlbum is made in Lisbon, Portugal by Aleksandr Belov and Norteira, a small independent studio. Small, independent, and hands-on.
Norteira also runs photoportugal.com and its sister photographer sites for Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Iceland and Austria— the sites where travellers book a photographer for a shoot. A photo book of that shoot is the same company’s work end to end: the gallery on the photo site, the book here, one team behind both.
At a glance
- MakeAlbum, operated by Aleksandr Belov (NIF 319455580), part of Norteira
- Lisbon, Portugal
- 300 × 300 mm layflat hardcover photo book, 26–80 pages
- €199–€349, shipping included — see pricing
- Printed in Europe by our print partner; typically 6–10 working days to EU addresses
- info@makealbum.com
Not ready yet? Read how it works, the FAQ or the help center.