Hickory for photographers
Album Design for Photographers — A Full Draft in Minutes, Not an Evening
Album design is the part of the job that eats evenings. You cull, you sequence, you nudge a photo three pixels, you export, you re-export after the client's feedback. Hickory drafts the whole book from the gallery you already delivered, then hands you the editor. You review a book instead of building one.
Start with a gallery you’ve already delivered. No new shoot required.
What the AI does with a delivered gallery
Upload the finished, retouched gallery. Hickory reads every frame — scene, who's in it, how many people, how it scores aesthetically — and pairs that with EXIF time and place. It sequences the shoot in order, picks one or two frames where you delivered eight near-identical ones, chooses a cover, and lays out spreads. What comes back is a complete draft with a cover on it, not an empty template.
It doesn't need to know what you shot
There is no wedding mode and no newborn preset. The engine works from capture times and its own read of the frames, so it spreads the selection across the whole shoot rather than bunching where you fired the most — the same behaviour on a ceremony, a first-birthday session, a season of games or a two-day conference. What it prints is your photographs and any captions you write. It does not invent chapter names or section headings, because a heading we guessed at is one more thing for you to delete.
You keep the last word on what goes in
The draft is a starting point, not a verdict. Cut any frame you don't want in the book, change the cover, switch the design template, and write the captions — or ask for a suggested one and keep it only if it's right. The machine does the tedious pass — sequencing, culling near-duplicates, fitting spreads — and leaves you the judgment pass, which is the part that was ever worth your evening.
The book itself, described honestly
An 8.5x11 casewrap hardcover, press printed in full color in full colour on 80# coated stock. It is not a lay-flat flush-mount album and we won't pretend otherwise — keep your flagship album where it is. This is the companion book you currently decline for lack of time. Length follows the gallery: more photos, more pages, within the 24 to 150 page range our printer runs.
Questions photographers ask
How long does the first draft take?
Uploading is the slow part and that's your connection, not us. Once the photos land, the first full draft is minutes.
How many pages will the book be?
However many the gallery needs. Page count is derived from the number of photos you include, inside our printer's 24 to 150 page range. There is no fixed length to design around.
Does it only work for weddings?
No. Nothing in the engine branches on the kind of shoot — it works from capture times and its own analysis of the frames, so newborn sessions, senior portraits, family shoots, team and recital days, corporate events, pet sessions and things we haven't thought of all run down the same path. The type field on a gallery is free text; write whatever you'd call it.
What does it cost me?
Opening a studio is free — set one up, upload a gallery, and look at the book it drafts before you pay us anything. You set the retail price your client sees, and your studio shows you one figure for what a copy costs you: printing, binding, US shipping to your client's door and our flat $8 per copy, added together. On the 100-page hardcover a new studio starts with, priced at $89, that figure is $31.78 and you keep $57.22. The $8 is flat, never a percentage, so we don't earn more because you charge more. Running a studio is a flat $39/month; the first 100 photographers to subscribe lock in a founding rate of $29/month for life. Billing is monthly, cancel anytime, and the pricing page has the full arithmetic.
Does my client see Hickory anywhere?
Your studio's name leads everywhere your client looks — the gallery, the storefront and the checkout — and the album is credited to you first, with one line underneath reading "Made with Hickory". We never sell or share your client list, and we never pitch anything to your client before a sale.
Related
Try it on one gallery you’ve already delivered.
Upload a finished gallery and look at the book it drafts. That’s the whole evaluation. Books print and ship to your client in two to three weeks, under your studio’s name.