Mixbook Expands Beyond Photo Books With Redesigned Visual Memories App

It’s fun to make photo books of precious memories or give them as gifts, but it’s much less fun to organize and select all the photos for the book. Photo book company Mixbook sees the problem and hopes to fix it with its new iOS app, designed to help users rediscover and organize huge libraries of personal photos.

Digital cameras and smartphones have been around long enough that many people have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of photos scattered across many years. People are capturing as many photos as ever, but ultimately, most of these images get buried in huge libraries, often never to be seen again.

Mixbook’s new iOS app attempts to resurface old photos while also filtering out duplicates and organizing shots into chronological, narrative-based timelines. For example, a family trip to California 10 years ago has its own section, photos and videos of a certain person get labeled, and there are even timelines of people in the new app.

Mixbook’s new app tries to bring a photo book-like experience onto the phone, too. Built-in AI creates “Stories.” These are interactive photo albums with generated text and timelines. Stories also have themes, like a specific person’s birthday party, an important holiday, or a trip.

While photographers may relish the artistic and creative control of managing their own photo libraries and custom-designing photo books, many people just want to experience and share their best memories, and tracking them down isn’t always easy.

“Our camera rolls hold the people and memories we care about most, but the stories behind those photos can easily get lost,” says Mixbook CEO and co-founder, Andrew Laffoon. “For 20 years, Mixbook has helped people preserve those stories through photo books. But the real value of a memory is how it helps us understand our lives, reconnect with people we love, and hold onto the moments that shape us. This represents the next chapter for Mixbook: giving people a home to bring the stories of their lives back together across digital and print.”

As expected, the new Mixbook app also makes it easier for people to purchase custom photo books. That is the company’s primary business, after all. With the new app, it should be much easier and quicker to get from idea to printed book. Mixbook hopes that the new app is more than just an easier way to create photo books, though, as the company believes its redesigned app is also a new, better way for people to store their visual memories.

Speaking of memory, the new Mixbook app arrives alongside a new Mixbook initiative, the Memory Project. The company is working alongside cognitive psychologist Dr. Christie Chung, a Provost at Palo Alto University and Mixbook’s Memory Science Advisor, to explore how memory and storytelling connect people to their images. Mixbook’s patent-pending memory technology uses data from photos and context that users provide to help surface and organize their images into relevant, meaningful stories. Mixbook notes that the initial photo analysis occurs on-device and users remain in control of what they share with the app.

The new Mixbook app is available to download and use for free, though an optional Mixbook+ subscription ($10 per month) offers expanded access to the new Stories tool and watermark-free sharing and downloads. The subscription also includes a $10 monthly credit toward print orders. Photo books are still free to create, and books themselves start at $14.99.

Image creditsMixbook