Hickory for photographers
Family, Newborn and Portrait Session Books — Without the Design Evening
A session ends, the gallery goes out, and the sale ends there. Not because the client didn't want something printed — they asked — but because designing a book for a two-hour session costs an evening you can't bill for. Hickory drafts that book from the gallery you already delivered, so the answer can be yes on the day you send it.
Start with a gallery you’ve already delivered. No new shoot required.
The same engine you'd use on a wedding, on a two-hour session
There is no newborn preset and no family mode, because there is no mode at all. The engine reads EXIF capture times and its own analysis of the frames — never what kind of shoot it was — so it sequences the gallery in order, spreads the selection across the whole session instead of bunching where you fired the most, and picks one or two frames where you delivered eight near-identical ones. A newborn morning, a maternity session, senior portraits, a first birthday and an extended-family shoot all run down the same path.
Grandparents are the second, third and fourth sale
One session, one designed book, and everyone who was in the room can order their own copy from the same gallery link. You designed it once. Every extra copy costs you the print and nothing else, so there is no reason left to decline the grandmother who asks in March. Print cost is flat per copy at any quantity — the twentieth order costs you exactly what the first did, and you set retail on all of them.
It prints your photographs and your words
What lands on the page is the frames you kept and any captions you wrote. Hickory does not invent chapter names or section headings for the parts of a session — a heading we guessed at is one more thing for you to delete, and one more thing a client can disagree with. You cut any frame you don't want, change the cover, switch the design template, and write the captions, or ask for a suggested line on a photo and keep it only if it's right.
What actually arrives at their door
An 8.5x11 casewrap hardcover, press printed in full color on archival paper, with a normal gutter. It is not a lay-flat flush-mount album and we won't market it as one. Length follows the gallery inside our printer's 24 to 150 page range — a 36-page hardcover lands at $20.50 for a single copy with US shipping included, and delivery runs 7–14 days straight to your client.
Questions photographers ask
A newborn session is 200 frames from one room in two hours. Does that work?
Yes. The engine paces the book on capture times, so a two-hour session gets spread across its own two hours the same way a twelve-hour day gets spread across twelve — the last twenty minutes earn pages even if you shot hardest in the first twenty. If fewer than 60% of the frames carry a capture time, or fewer than 60% have finished analysing, it drops to an even spread across the whole set — first and last frame included — rather than taking the first however-many. The design run tells you which of the two it used and how much of the gallery it had analysed, so you always know what you're looking at.
Do I need to shoot or cull differently to use this?
No. Upload the finished, retouched gallery exactly as you'd hand it over. The engine works from what you delivered, so nothing unretouched can reach a printed page.
Can each grandparent get a different book?
No. A gallery has one book, and everyone who orders from that gallery gets that same book. If you want a genuinely different edit for someone, that's a separate gallery with its own photos and its own drafted book.
Does it name the parts of the session?
No. The printed book carries your photographs and the captions you wrote, and nothing else. We don't print headings for parts of a shoot, invented or otherwise.
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 keep what's left after our print cost: a 36-page hardcover lands at $20.50 for a single copy with US shipping included, and we take no commission on your sales. 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 cost breakdown.
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 7–14 days, under your studio’s name.