Photo album and scrapbook maker Keepsy is releasing Instant Album, a photo book for Instagram photos. The new product, available Tuesday, aims to help users transform those signature stylized, filtered and tilt-shifted square photos into physical keepsakes.
The Instant Album product pre-selects 30 to 35 of the user’s best filtered Instagram photos, as determined by “likes,” and auto-generates an album with pages of photos grouped by time in an experience that strips out the complexities normally involved in the photo book creation process.
Those with a penchant for detail can lose themselves in the Instant Album-making processing if they so choose. Users can edit the album’s layout, drag-and-drop photos onto the same page, edit backgrounds, add artwork, customize text and font and transform each album page as they see fit.
The final result is an 11-by-8.5 inch hardback album that retails for $29.95 for 30 pages, with each additional page costing $0.99.
“We want to be the easiest photo album builder in the world,” says co-founder Blake Williams.
Keepsy, having released its first scrapbook builder for Facebook friends in December, happened upon a bigger pain point in the digital-to-physical photo album conversion process. “People don’t like to build photo albums,” says Williams, “because photo albums are a pain in the ass to make.”
That realization became the impetus for Instant Album, especially after Williams noticed that other developers were using the Instagram API for physical keepsakes such as prints, post cards and picture frames, but not yet for albums or scrapbooks.
For now, Keepsy’s keeping mum on its number of users and printed photo books, in part because it’s in the midst of raising another round of financing. Keepsy’s plans also include mobile applications that simplify and enhance the group photo album creation process.