Print photos from your phone

The reminder, the sorting, the ordering, the paying and the mailing all happen without you. The choosing does not.

A model can tell which photo is sharp and which face is in focus. It cannot tell that the blurry one is the last picture of your grandfather. So we shortlist about a hundred and you pick ten. It takes two minutes on the first of the month, and you can change your mind until the 10th.

Choosing for you sounds better than it prints. Ten pictures of a car park are still ten pictures of a car park, and you paid to mail them.

Photos taken on an iPhone reach us through Google Photos. Install the Google Photos app, turn backup on, and your camera roll syncs in the background. After that, each month you tap through Google's picker and hand us only the photos you chose.

If you back up only to iCloud, Shoebox cannot see anything. That is a real limit, not a preference: Apple offers no equivalent picker for a website to use. We would rather say so here than after you have paid.

Google Photos backup is usually already on. Sign in with the same Google account, pick your month, done.

• Only what you hand over. You choose photos inside Google's own picker. We cannot browse your library, and the access expires within about an hour.
• Only for that month. Next month you choose again. Nothing carries over.
• Never an AI company. The curator runs on our own server. No photo of yours is sent to any AI provider, and none of it trains anything.
• Not for long. Print-quality copies sit encrypted until the lab confirms it has them, then we delete them.

The privacy policy spells all of that out, including who else touches a photo on its way to paper.

Ten 4×6 prints on photo paper from a professional lab, flat in an envelope. Not a mug, not a magnet, not a calendar you did not ask for.

Prints go out on the 10th and usually arrive within the week. Miss a month and nothing prints that month, though the membership still bills — cancel in Settings if you want the charges to stop.

You can. A phone can send photos to a lab or a free print app for a few cents a print, and both are cheaper than we are. We have written up the alternatives honestly, with their own prices and the dates we checked them. The only thing we sell that they do not is a day it actually happens.