Hickory for photographers
Upload the finished gallery. Our AI designs the book in minutes. Your client buys it under your studio's name, at the price you set, and you keep the difference. Weddings, newborns, portraits, teams, corporate events — the same workflow on whatever you shot.
Start with a gallery you've already delivered. No new shoot required.
What this replaces
Selling a book today means stitching together design software, a proofing gallery, a print lab, and a storefront. Each one works. Together they cost you a night per album.
Album design software
You lay out every spread by hand
Proofing gallery
A second login, a second bill
Print lab account
Minimums, and boxes shipped to you
Storefront or invoices
You chase the payment yourself
Four subscriptions. Five to ten hours per album, or roughly $144 to outsource the design.
Gallery
Upload once; your client browses on their phone
Design
A full book drafted in minutes, then you edit
Storefront
Your client checks out inside the gallery
Print and ship
Drop-shipped to them with your name inside
One login. You review a draft instead of building one.
What you earn
Your studio shows two figures beside the price field: what a copy costs you, and what you keep. The cost figure is everything it takes to put the book in your client’s hands — printing, binding, shipping to their door, and our $8 per copy — added into one line. No line items to reconcile, and nothing that scales with what you charge.
You price it at
$89
The suggested price on the Signature Album a new studio starts with. Change it to whatever your clients pay.
A copy costs you
$31.78
Printed, bound, and shipped to your client's door, with our $8 fee included. One figure, not a breakdown.
You keep
$57.22
Every dollar you add to the price is another dollar here. The cost doesn't move when you do.
A recital, a league day, a reunion. Twenty-five families get the gallery link. Ten order the 100-page book at $89. You designed it once.
Ten families, ten separate orders
$572.20
$890 collected, each copy shipped to a different address.
Or ten copies in one order
$622.40
Same $890, one parcel to one address, so the cost per copy falls to $26.76.
$89 is the suggested starting price on a new studio's price sheet, not a price we set for you. Every figure above moves with the one you type.
Ten of twenty-five ordering is an illustration, not a promise; your gallery will do better or worse. Nothing here is an average, because we don’t have enough studios to have one.
The bulk figure is shipping, not printing: printing costs the same per copy at every quantity, and we don’t pretend otherwise. Ten copies to ten homes is ten separate parcels and gets no discount at all.
Costs are for delivery inside the US, and a longer gallery makes a longer book and costs a little more. Your studio shows the exact figure for the book you actually built, before you publish it.
Books you can sell tomorrow
This isn't a swap for your flagship album. It's the companion books clients ask for and you decline for lack of time. And if you don't sell an album at all — team days, corporate work, sessions — it's simply a printed product you never had the hours to offer.
The wedding book again for both mothers, or the family session for the grandparents — designed once, printed as often as they ask.
A newborn, senior portrait or engagement session as a hardcover, sent with the gallery.
One shoot, twenty-five families, twenty-five chances to sell.
A conference, a fundraiser, a season. The client's own printed record of the day.
Straight talk on the book
Every Hickory book is a press-printed casewrap hardcover in full colour on 80# coated stock. It is genuinely beautiful. It is not a lay-flat flush-mount album, and we won't pretend it is. Keep your flagship where it belongs. Let Hickory cover everything around it.
Cover
Casewrap hardcover
Press-printed, 80# coated stock
Binding
Standard bound, not lay-flat
Best for
Companion and gift books
Questions photographers actually ask
It doesn't know what you shoot, which is the point. The engine reads capture times and its own analysis of the frames — never a genre — so it orders the book chronologically and spreads the selection across the whole shoot instead of bunching where you fired the most. A wedding, a newborn morning, a season of games, a two-day conference and something we've never seen all run down the same path. The type field on a gallery is free text: write whatever you'd call it.
No. The printed book carries your photographs and the captions you wrote, and nothing else. We don't invent headings for parts of the day, because a page reading something we guessed at is worse than no page at all — and it would be one more thing for you or your client to argue with.
No, and it isn't trying to be. Flush-mount albums lay flat on thick, mounted spreads. Ours is a casewrap hardcover with a normal gutter. It is the book you sell beside your flagship, not instead of it. Pitch it as the companion to your flagship album, not a replacement.
You do. The gallery, the shop, and every campaign you send lead with your studio’s name, and we never sell or share your client list. What your client does see of us: a small “Made with Hickory” credit under your name, order emails and the payment receipt (those come from Hickory today), and — only after a book has been delivered — one note that Hickory also makes books from their own photos. Never before a sale, and never about the album they bought from you.
You get them back. When you cancel we keep your files available for thirty days so you can download every gallery before anything is removed. While we're small that export is hands-on: ask, and a person runs it the same day. We don't hold your work hostage to keep a subscription alive.
Only when you send a campaign, and it goes out under your studio's name. Every message carries a working unsubscribe. We never send your clients anything about Hickory, and we never sell or share the list.
We store display and print derivatives, not your originals: a thumbnail, a preview, and a print-resolution file. The original is never uploaded, so it never leaves your drive — that keeps storage honest and your archive yours. Your studio starts with 500 GB of derivative storage, and we tell you when you're close.
$39/month, and the first 100 studios lock in $29/month for life. Cancel any time. Nothing else is billed to you: the per-copy cost comes out of what your client pays at checkout, not out of your pocket.
Not a percentage, but not nothing either, and we’d rather you read it here than find it later: we keep a flat $8 on every copy sold. Price the book at $89 and we keep $8; price it at $400 and we keep $8. It is already inside the cost figure your studio shows you, so the margin next to it is what you actually keep — $57.22 on the Signature Album at $89.
It’s not ours alone, no — the wedding platforms have been shipping it since spring. Two things are different here. It doesn’t only do weddings: the engine never branches on shoot type, so a recital, a conference and a newborn morning run the same path. And the book sells inside the gallery you were already sending, so there is no second storefront and no print-lab account to set up.
Uploading is the slow part, and that's your connection, not us. Once the photos land, the first book draft takes minutes. Most studios spend more time choosing the cover than editing the pages.
Start here
A wedding, a newborn session, a team day, a conference — whichever gallery you sent last. Upload it and look at the book it designs. That's the whole evaluation. Ten minutes, and you'll know.
Leave your email and we'll send the walkthrough, the current subscription pricing, and a real book sample to look at.