Make a baby photo book from your camera roll

Kathaleaf runs in the browser, on a phone or a computer, so you can start wherever the photos are. Add them straight from your camera roll or from Google Drive. iPhone photos are usually HEIC files, which many tools refuse or ask you to convert first; Kathaleaf decodes HEIC and HEIF in the browser, so they go in as they are, at full resolution.

Your photos are not uploaded to Kathaleaf to do any of this. They are stored and processed on the device you are using, which is the point for photos of a newborn. You sign in with Google or a passkey to use Kathaleaf, and if you want a safety net, the optional backup is end-to-end encrypted on your device before it leaves. The private photo book maker page explains how that works.

A phone is fine for choosing and arranging. For a big book, a laptop is more comfortable, so make the album on the device you plan to finish it on: albums live on the device where you made them.

Baby photos come in bursts: twenty frames of the same yawn, each very slightly different. Kathaleaf groups bursts and near-duplicates together and marks the highest-resolution shot in each group, so you compare a handful of candidates instead of scrolling past the same moment again and again. Blurry and low-resolution photos are flagged too, which matters with a wriggling subject in indoor light. The flags are advice only; nothing is deleted.

Because every photo is read on your device, you can bring in the whole year at once, from your phone and your partner's, and let the grouping do the first pass. Kathaleaf reads the date each photo was taken, so pictures from different phones fall into one timeline.

A good rule is one strong photo per moment, and a few close-ups of the details you will forget: hands, feet, the first outfit, the first time they sat up on their own.

Kathaleaf's auto-flow places your kept photos in the order they were taken, which suits a first-year book: it reads as the baby grows. A book has 40, 50 or 60 interior pages, in A4 landscape or a 12-inch square. Some ideas that work well:

• One spread per month, with the same pose or the same toy for scale each time.
• A collage spread for the busy months, so the book doesn't run out of pages by month six.
• Captions with dates and first words. You choose the font and the colour.
• A cover with their name and birth date, designed front and back.

Edits are non-destructive: tone and crop adjustments sit beside your original photo and never change the file. When the book looks right, the Proof stage shows every spread and both covers at print resolution before you export.

The download is a 300 dpi print-ready PDF with 3 mm of bleed, in a CMYK version for a print shop and an RGB version for a home printer, plus a specification sheet to hand over with the file. There is no charge and no watermark; you pay only whoever prints it. A book that will be handled by small hands deserves heavier paper (around 200 to 250 gsm) and laminated covers. The print guide explains exactly what to ask for, and how to print and bind it at home if you prefer.

If you print at home, use the RGB PDF, print at 100% scale on matte photo paper and let each sheet dry before stacking. A simple stab binding or a screw-post binder makes a sturdy book, and a screw-post binder lets you add pages as the second year arrives.

Because the PDF is yours, you can print a second copy for the grandparents any time, from any printer, without making the book again. Printing by Kathaleaf is coming later.

Keep the album on your device after printing. When the second year is done, start a new album the same way, and you will end up with a matching set on the shelf, each made in an evening rather than a month of weekends.