The photobook question we kept getting asked
Three months after launching Poolr, I received an email from Sarah, who'd used it for her wedding. She'd collected 400 photos from guests, loved the shared gallery, and had one follow-up question: could she turn them into a printed book? I remember reading it twice, thinking we'd solved the hard problem already. Turns out, we'd only solved half of it.
What happens after the gallery goes live
When we first built Poolr, the assumption was straightforward. Guests come, scan the QR code, upload their photos, everyone celebrates the shared album. Job done. But what I didn't anticipate was the conversation that happens weeks or months later, when a host sits down with those photos and realises they want something tangible. Not just a digital memory, but something to hold, to flip through, to leave on a coffee table. Sarah's email was the third or fourth in that vein, and by the tenth, I realised this wasn't a niche request. It was the natural next step of what we'd built.The problem was timing. By the point someone wanted a photobook, they'd already used Poolr. They'd collected the photos. Now they had to export them, upload them somewhere else, wait for printing, pay separately. Three friction points, when we'd spent so much effort eliminating friction on the capture side. It felt wrong.
A feature that almost didn't happen
Adding photobook generation wasn't a slam-dunk decision internally. We're a small studio. Every feature we build takes time away from something else. The argument was reasonable: build a Zapier integration instead, let partners handle printing. Let the market solve it.But I kept thinking about Sarah's wedding, and about the hundreds of other events where the best photos came from guests who had phone cameras, not professional gear. A wedding photographer might use Poolr to collect guest photos alongside their own work, but a corporate team or a birthday organiser? Those folks don't have a second shooter. The guest gallery is their gallery. And if we'd made it easy to collect those photos, didn't we owe it to them to make it easy to preserve them too?
We decided to build it. Not as a third-party integration, but as a native feature. We partnered with a print provider, integrated it directly into Poolr, and made the workflow dead simple. You open your gallery, hit 'create photobook', select which photos you want, choose a layout, and order. No export, no new account, no hunting for another service. It lives in the Occasion tier because it's not essential for everyone, but it's there for those who want it.
The hidden design problem we didn't expect
Building the feature was one thing. Making it actually good was another.The first internal test was a disaster. We'd set up a default cover, auto-selected all uploaded photos, and let users reorder manually. The result was a book that looked like a contact sheet. Seventy photos, half of them blurry, three duplicates of someone's thumb, and a cover that looked like it was designed by committee.
So we thought about what a human would actually do. If you were making a photobook from a gallery, you wouldn't use every single shot. You'd be selective. You'd want the moments that told the story, not the test shots and accidents. We added a feature to let the host flag their favourite photos as you're building the album. Not forced, not required, but there if you want it. When you go to make the book, those flagged photos appear first. The algorithm isn't magic, but it means most photobooks end up being thirty or forty carefully chosen moments instead of every upload.
That one small thing made the printed result feel intentional instead of haphazard.
What this tells us about events
Looking back, I think the photobook feature works because it respects the lifecycle of an event. There's the gathering itself. There's the immediate aftermath, when the gallery is full of new photos and everyone's sharing and commenting. That's Poolr's core. But there's also what comes after. A month later, six months later. You want something that lives beyond the screen.We'd built a tool for capturing the moment. Adding the ability to preserve it felt like completing the thought. Not everyone will use it, and that's fine. Some hosts are purely digital. But for the couple looking to relive their wedding, the parent wanting a record of their child's school event, the team that wants to commemorate a retreat, it's there. And it works without requiring them to learn a new tool or jump through hoops.
The version that actually exists
One thing I've learned building Poolr is that the version you ship is never the version you imagined at the start. The photobook feature we have now is simpler than what we first sketched. We cut some ideas because they made the interface noisy. We added others because early users asked for them. There's no AI curation (we save that for other tiers, where it makes sense). There's no weird stylisation or forced themes. It's straightforward: your photos, printed nicely, in the format people have trusted for decades.That's not because we were unambitious. It's because every feature we add has to earn its complexity. When we tested different layouts and cover options, the simple ones won. When we offered auto-arrangements and filters, users turned them off. People collecting photos from a guest gallery don't want Poolr to think for them. They want to say 'print these' and have it look like what they had in mind.
Sarah's email sat in my inbox for months before we built this feature. I wonder how many other follow-up questions from hosts are sitting in someone's inbox right now, pointing to the gap between what we've built and what people actually need. What's the one thing your guests ask for after the event is over?