The editor, in detail
Everything on the editor screen and what it does. The same ground the tour inside the editor covers, at more length and in an order you can skip around.
The tour itself is in the editor, behind the question mark in its toolbar.
All the ways to add something
Everything you can put on a page starts here: photos, ready-made layouts, shapes, text, stickers, freehand drawing and page backgrounds. Click an icon to open its panel, and click it again to put the panel away.
The panel opens beside the rail and can be dragged wider from its own edge; the width is remembered per album, so the size you like for thumbnails is the size you get next time. Pressing the icon of the panel that is already open closes it, which is how you give the canvas the screen without leaving the tab you were on.
Your photos
Every photo in this album. The tabs above them show all of them, only the ones already on a page, or only the ones still unused. Drag a photo onto the canvas to place it, or onto a frame to fill it.
Photos are uploaded on the Photos step before you reach the editor, including by anybody you sent a contributor link to. Dragging onto empty page space places the photo about 75mm wide and keeps its proportions; dragging onto an empty frame fills the frame and crops the photo to fit it instead. A photo can be used as many times as you like: the badge on its thumbnail counts where it has been used already, and clicking that badge lists the pages.
Finding the right photo
Separate the grid by the day a photo was taken, or by who uploaded it. Photos whose file carries no date of its own are gathered together at the end.
These separators are a way of reading the grid rather than a filter: nothing is hidden by switching one on. The date comes from the photo file itself. A picture forwarded through a messaging app usually arrives with that information stripped out, so it has no date to sort by, and those are collected under one heading at the end rather than given a date nothing supports. The whole header folds away behind the chevron in its corner when you would rather have the room for pictures.
Who is in the photo
If you named people on the People step, filter the grid by them. Any shows photos with any of them in it; Only these shows photos where nobody else appears, not even a face we did not recognise.
People come from the People step, which finds faces and asks you to name the ones you care about. Nothing is named on its own. Any means at least one of the people you picked is in the photo. Only these is stricter: it also excludes any photo containing somebody else, including a face that was detected but never identified, which is what makes it the way to find pictures of just the two of them. If some photos have not been scanned yet, the filter says so rather than letting them look as though they have gone missing.
Ready-made layouts
Pick how many photos a page holds and drop a whole arrangement onto it, for one page or across the spread. Every layout here already respects this album's margins and its minimum photo size.
A layout is generated for your album’s own page size rather than scaled from a fixed design, so its margins and gaps are real millimetres on your book. Any arrangement that would push a photo below the smallest size worth printing is not offered at all. You can apply one to the left page, the right page or the whole spread, and either replace what is there or add on top of it.
Shapes
Frames to put a photo in, from circles and arches to ribbons and tags. Drop one on the page, then drag a photo into it.
A shape is a frame rather than a picture: it stays empty until you drag a photo into it, and the photo is then cropped to its outline. Double-clicking a filled shape lets you slide and zoom the picture inside the frame without moving the frame itself. Shapes are drawn as vector outlines, so they stay crisp at any size in print.
Text
Titles, captions and quotes. Pick a style to add a text box already set in a face and size that suits it, then double-click the box to type.
A style sets the typeface, size, weight and colour of a new box in one go. The three Basic styles are the exception: they use the album’s own heading and body fonts from Album settings, so they follow whatever you set there. A box follows whatever gets typed into it until you pin its reading direction from the toolbar. That toolbar, which appears over a box while you are editing it, also carries alignment, line and letter spacing, colour, and a button that adds Hebrew vowel points to the whole box at once.
Stickers
Drawn art and emoji, grouped by theme. Drop one on the page and resize it like anything else.
Every sticker is drawn from geometry rather than stored as an image, which is why one stays sharp however large you make it. Emoji work the same way: they are drawn as artwork rather than set in a font, and that is what lets them print in colour rather than as black shapes. Stickers do not take the album’s default frame border, since a rectangle drawn around a shape that is not a rectangle is rarely what anyone wants.
Drawing
Draw straight onto the spread with a pen, a pencil or a marker. One stroke is one item you can move, lock or undo.
Points are captured in the page’s own millimetres, so a stroke drawn while zoomed in comes out the same size on paper as one drawn while zoomed out. Each finished stroke becomes an ordinary item: select it, move it, resize it, lock it, send it behind a photo, or delete it. There is no eraser, because deleting the stroke is that same act. The marker covers what is under it rather than tinting it, so it will hide a photograph rather than highlight one.
Page backgrounds
Designed backgrounds and any colour you like, for this page, this spread or the whole album. Each one is generated for your album's own proportions.
A background can be applied to this spread, to a range of spreads, or to the whole album, and the whole-album choice also becomes the default for spreads you add later. The designs are generated at your album’s proportions instead of being stretched from a single picture, so shapes keep their form on every page size. A background can also be one of your own photographs. In print, a spread’s background is drawn once across both pages and split at the spine, so the halves meet.
The spread
Both pages of the open book at once, with the spine down the middle. Drag anything to move it, drag its corners to resize, and double-click a photo inside a frame to slide and zoom the picture within it.
Several items can be selected at once by dragging a box around them or with Ctrl+A, and nudged with the arrow keys. Things snap to each other and to the page as you drag, with guides showing what they are lining up with. A small grip appears on a picture you hover or select on its own: dragging that grip onto another picture swaps the two. A red badge on a photo means it has been placed larger than its pixels can print well, and clicking the badge explains. The dashed guide, when switched on, is the safe margin, and nothing you would mind losing should cross it.
When you select something
Click anything on the page and this panel fills in: its border and fill, its colour, its exact size and position, and the buttons to delete it or lock it so it cannot be moved or deleted by accident.
Border & Fill works across a mixed selection, and can copy what you set to the whole spread or the whole album from inside its own popup. Adjust carries six one-tap looks plus brightness, contrast, saturation and warmth, and it belongs to the picture rather than to the frame, so it travels with the photo through a swap. Size & position appears when exactly one item is selected, and a photo inside a frame gets a zoom slider there too. Locking stops an item being moved, restacked or deleted by accident, from the keyboard and the right-click menu as well as by dragging.
Lining things up
Select two or more items and align their left, right, top or bottom edges to each other. Ctrl+A selects everything on the page.
Alignment is relative to the other items you selected rather than to the page, so aligning two photos to the left moves them to the leftmost edge among them. Left and right here mean the left and right of the open book, and they do not swap when the interface is in Hebrew. Locked items are left where they are.
Even gaps and margins
Set the gap between photos and the margin around them, and apply it to one page, this spread, or the whole album at once. Choose whether the photos are resized to fill the page, kept at their size, or scaled together to fit.
Spacing is a property of a page rather than of a selection, which is why it has a scope of its own instead of asking you to select everything first. Resize to fill makes the photos fill the page exactly at the margin and gap you set. Keep sizes evens the gaps without resizing anything and centres the result, leaving the margins to fall where they fall. Scale to fit shrinks the whole arrangement by one factor and preserves every proportion. The gap and margin it starts from come from Album settings. However many pages it touches, it is one undo step.
Suggest layout
Arranges the photos already on the page for you, and offers several arrangements to choose between. Nothing is added or removed, and one undo puts it back.
Suggest reads the photos already on the page and packs them into rows, scoring each arrangement on how much it has to crop from each photo against how much space it leaves unused. It offers several so the choice stays yours, and offers more of them the more photos there are. Some of the arrangements use shapes. It never adds or removes a photo, and one undo puts back exactly what was there before.
The pages of the book
Every spread in the album. Click one to work on it, drag to reorder, and the plus adds another spread at the end. Right-click a spread for the rest.
The strip runs the way the book does: an album bound on the right puts spread 1 at the right-hand end. Right-clicking a spread offers duplicate and delete, and deleting asks first and says what is on the spread, because a thumbnail this small cannot show you. A book has a minimum of 20 printed pages and a maximum of 100. Page numbers, once switched on in Album settings, are drawn on the canvas but are not layers on it: nothing can select, move or cover one.
Album settings
Everything that describes the whole book: bleed and safe margin for your printer, the file type, page numbers, the alphabet the book is set in with its heading and body fonts, and the border every new photo frame gets. The fonts and the border are given to things as you add them, so each has its own Apply button for the pages you have already made.
Print holds what a lab dictates: the bleed, the safe margin, the resolution below which a photo is flagged, the file type, and whether spreads are split into single pages. Getting those wrong is the only mistake here that can cost a reprint, which is why the first download asks you to confirm them. Text sets the album’s alphabet and its heading and body fonts; a font that cannot draw that alphabet is pushed below a line rather than hidden, since an album in Hebrew can still want a Latin title. Page numbers are off by default, and once on are printed on every spread from wherever you choose to start. Everything here saves the moment you change it.