# How to prepare your photos for a photo book (and what not to bother with) > HEIC, screenshots, duplicates, bursts, dark frames, the 30-photo minimum and what a brief is for. Most preparation is unnecessary; here is what helps. Source: https://makealbum.com/blog/prepare-photos-for-a-photo-book · MakeAlbum, Lisbon, Portugal 2026-09-03 · MakeAlbum team · 5 min read --- People spend an evening preparing their photos before uploading them to a photo book tool: converting formats, deleting duplicates, hunting screenshots, pruning the dark ones. With most tools that evening is necessary. With MakeAlbum most of it is wasted, because the upload pipeline was built to take a camera roll as it is. This article separates the preparation that helps from the preparation that does not. ## Do not convert HEIC iPhones shoot HEIC (High Efficiency Image Format) by default. Many services want JPEG, so people export first, which takes time and often discards the original file's metadata along the way. Upload HEIC directly. MakeAlbum accepts JPEG, HEIC and HEIF, PNG, WebP and AVIF, up to 50 MB per file. HEIC files are converted on the server; the EXIF block, including capture time, GPS and camera, is read from the untouched original before conversion, so nothing is lost. A Live Photo uploads as its still frame. If you are exporting from a computer anyway, export originals ("unmodified originals" in Photos on a Mac) rather than "most compatible" JPEGs. The originals are larger and carry everything. ## Do not delete screenshots They are set aside automatically. A frame is treated as a screenshot when its filename says so (`Screenshot 2026-06-20`, `Screen Shot`, and equivalents in other languages), when the EXIF software field names a screenshot tool, or when its content labels and aspect ratio look like a phone or computer screen. Photos of documents, receipts, boarding passes and the like are set aside the same way. Nothing is thrown away. Set-aside frames stay in the photo tray in the editor, where you can drag any of them into a spread if a screenshot is part of the story. If one slips through, remove it there. Nothing is printed until you approve every spread. ## Do not prune duplicates or bursts This is the preparation people spend the most time on, and it is the least necessary. Two photos whose perceptual hashes are within a small distance are treated as one moment. Frames shot within three seconds of each other, according to their camera timestamps, are treated as a burst even if a change of framing pushes the hashes further apart. Photos with the same content labels taken close together are grouped as well. From each group one frame is kept, chosen by a score that combines the image-recognition quality estimate, the sharpness measurement, the resolution and the number of faces. The rest remain in the tray. If the frame that was kept has the wrong expression, swap it for a sibling from the same burst in the editor. Hand-pruning before upload can be worse than not pruning. People keep the frame they remember rather than the sharpest, and with the siblings deleted there is nothing to swap in later. ## Do not remove dark or blurred frames Every photo gets a sharpness score (the variance of a Laplacian filter over the image) and an exposure reading (mean brightness, contrast, and the share of clipped pixels). Frames that score poorly are ranked low and are unlikely to be selected, and they too remain in the tray. The reason not to delete them yourself: a slightly soft frame is sometimes the only one of a moment, and a dark frame of the right moment can carry a page better than a sharp frame of nothing. Let the ranking make the first call and overrule it where you disagree. ## Do upload enough Curation needs at least 30 photos to start. Between 50 and 300 photos per album works best. The curation selects roughly two photos per interior page, so a 26-page book uses about 60 frames and an 80-page book about 280; a set of 500 leaves room for the filter to be selective. Upload the whole set from one event or trip rather than a pre-selection. If you upload only the 80 you already chose, the pipeline has nothing to choose between and the chapters will be thinner than they need to be. Uploads run in the background and each photo is processed as it arrives. On a slow connection a large HEIC set takes a while; the album page shows progress, and you can come back to it. ## Do write a brief This is the preparation that helps most, and it takes five minutes. The brief is a free-text field of up to 4,000 characters on the album page. Write who is in the photos, where they were taken, the dates, and anything the titles should get right. The brief is fed to the models that pick each chapter's hero frame and draft the chapter titles and captions, and it is treated as ground truth: names and places in the brief are used; ones not in the brief are not invented. An example of a useful brief: > Two weeks in Sicily, 3 to 17 June, with Ana, Tomás and the twins (Inês and Rui, aged four). Palermo first, then Cefalù, then a week at a farmhouse near Noto. The day at the Scala dei Turchi was the twins' first time in the sea. That is enough for the chapters to come out as Palermo, Cefalù and Noto with the right names in the captions, instead of generic titles that you then rewrite. You can re-roll a title or a caption in the editor as often as you like, and each re-roll reads the brief. ## What you do after the upload The rest happens in the editor, not in preparation. You review the chapters before any page is laid out: the draft titles, the hero picks, the photos in each. You can ask for fewer or more chapters, a single chapter, or chapters by day, place or people. Then the layout engine builds the spreads, and you can swap photos from the tray, reorder spreads, rename chapters, rewrite captions, re-roll the AI titles or a spread's layout, change the album style, choose the cover and set the page count. The price updates as you add pages, from €179 for 26 pages to €379 for 130. The [how it works](https://makealbum.com/how-it-works) page describes each step, and the [examples](https://makealbum.com/examples) show finished spreads. ## The zero-effort path If even the review is more than you want to do, choose Done-for-you when you order. It costs €59 on top of the album price. You upload at least 30 photos and write the brief; our team curates the photos, designs every spread and writes the titles and captions. You get a preview by email, typically within 2 to 4 business days, and can ask for changes as often as you like. Nothing is printed until you press approve, so the only two actions on your side are paying and approving. The [pricing page](https://makealbum.com/pricing) has the details. ## Summary Skip: converting HEIC, deleting screenshots, pruning duplicates and bursts, removing dark or blurred frames. Do: upload originals, upload the whole set (at least 30 photos, up to 300), write a brief with names, places and dates, and spend your time in the chapter review rather than in the camera roll. Photos are stored privately in EU object storage, never used to train models, and deleted 90 days after your order ships or as soon as you delete the album.