The Trip Photo Album turns the photos you took on a trip into a curated, narrated story — and from there into a designed photo book you can have printed as a real hardcover. The flow has three stages:
- Add your photos — from your phone's photo library, or on a Mac by choosing files (great for camera SD cards)
- Create the story — AI groups photos by day and place, hides near-duplicates, and writes a narrative for each stop
- Design and print the book (best on a Mac or iPad) — a page-by-page book you can fine-tune and export as a print-ready PDF
Everyone on the trip project can contribute their own photos, and everyone sees the same album.
1. Adding your trip photos
- Open your trip project and go to the Album.
- Tap Add photos. Focal Point scans your photo library for pictures taken during the trip's dates and groups them by trip day.
- Review each day — every day has its own All / None toggle and its own upload button, so you can contribute one day at a time or everything at once.
- Photos upload at print quality. That matters later: the book export needs full-resolution images, and they're captured now, while they're still in your library.
Missing photos? Pictures in a shared iCloud library (taken by a family member) may not appear in the scan. Use Add manually in the picker to select them from the system photo picker — their dates and locations are read from the photo itself so they still group into the right day.
Limited access: if you granted Focal Point access to only some photos, use the buttons on the picker to expand the selection or open Settings.
On a Mac: Add photos opens a file chooser instead of the library scan — pick JPEGs from anywhere (a camera's SD card, a folder). Capture dates and locations are read from each file, so they land on the right trip days. RAW and HEIC files aren't supported yet.
2. Creating the story
Tap the ✨ Create the story button. The AI then:
- Groups photos into day sections, and splits busy days by stop (the waterfall, the glacier, the restaurant) using each photo's location
- Writes a short narrative for each section based on your itinerary — where you went, where you stayed
- Sets aside near-duplicates (five shots of the same statue) keeping the best one — nothing is deleted, the rest go to the Outtakes tab
The album has three tabs:
- Story — the finished album: day headers, per-stop sections, narratives, photos
- New — photos uploaded since the last story build; run Create again to weave them in (you can rebuild just one day)
- Outtakes — benched photos: AI second-choices and ones you removed. Nothing here is lost; tap to bring any back
Curating
- Tap the ✕ on any photo to bench it (it moves to Outtakes)
- In Outtakes, drag across a row to multi-select, then include or delete in bulk
- Tap a photo to view it full screen — swipe to browse, pinch to zoom, and use the buttons to hide it, caption it, set it as the album cover, or delete it
- After choosing a cover, use the tune button on the cover to zoom and position it exactly
- Rebuilding the story keeps your edits: sections you've edited and photos you've benched stay as you left them
3. The photo book (Mac & iPad)
Open the album on your Mac or iPad and tap the book icon. Tap Generate book from album and the layout engine turns your story into a real book: each section gets an opener page (a hero photo with the title and narrative), followed by dense photo collage pages — five- and six-photo mosaics, full-bleed, like a professional photo book.
The book reads like a book: the cover first, then facing-page spreads. Turn pages with the arrow keys, the on-screen arrows, or a trackpad swipe. The filmstrip along the bottom jumps anywhere instantly.
Editing pages
- Change a page's layout — the grid button under each page shows every layout with a small diagram; pick one and the photos reflow
- Swap a photo — click any photo slot to choose a different album photo (use the Selfies filter to find people shots fast)
- Zoom & position — the ⛶ button on each photo opens the crop editor, framed exactly as the slot prints
- Text anywhere — the T button turns any photo slot into a text block. Switch it back and your text is kept in the background (an amber badge marks it)
- Story text follows the page — if you pick a photo-only layout, the AI story is saved, not lost; the amber badge in the toolbar shows and edits it
- Reorder / delete pages with the arrows and trash under each page
- Undo — the ↶ button in the top bar walks back your recent edits, including deleted pages
- Regenerate re-lays-out the book from the album; pages you've edited are kept
Book sizes, from the size menu in the top bar: 8×10″ portrait, 10×8″ landscape, 7×7″ square, and 12×12″ large square. The exported PDF is built to Blurb’s exact hardcover ImageWrap spec for the size you pick.
4. Printing a real book
Photo-book websites can't import outside designs — but professional book printers accept print-ready PDFs, and Focal Point exports exactly that.
- In the book, tap the PDF button in the top bar.
- Focal Point downloads your photos at print resolution, optimizes them, and composes the PDF — a progress bar keeps you posted (a few minutes for a large book).
- On a Mac, two files land in your Downloads folder — the interior (all pages) and the cover; on an iPad they arrive via the share sheet.
- If any photo would print soft (below 200 DPI — usually screenshots or heavy zoom-ins), the export lists it by page so you can swap it first.
Then upload to Blurb. The pages are sized with the standard 1/8″ printing bleed, so what you designed is what gets printed and trimmed.
Ordering from Blurb
- Go to blurb.com and sign in (a free account is fine).
- Open Design Tools → PDF to Book.
- Upload the interior PDF, then the cover PDF when prompted — the cover is a full wraparound (back, spine, and front) sized to your page count and paper.
- Choose Hardcover, ImageWrap; Blurb auto-matches your book size. Pick the same paper (Standard, Premium, or ProLine) you chose in the export dialog — the cover's spine is built for that paper.
- Preview the whole book, then add to cart to order.
You can also just share the two PDFs with family — anyone can view them, and anyone can use them to order their own copy.
Tips
- Add photos before creating the story — the AI works day by day, so upload each traveler's photos first for the richest narrative.
- Curate in the album, design in the book. Benching junk photos before generating the book saves page-by-page cleanup.
- Edit after regenerating, not before. Regenerate replaces only untouched pages — do your big regenerate first, then fine-tune.
- Photos are stored at print quality from day one, so a book ordered years later prints just as sharp — even if the originals have left your phone.