How to make a photo book from iPhone photos
The hard part of making a photo book from an iPhone is not design. It is extraction. Your photos are spread across iCloud, half of them are in a format some tools still refuse to open, your camera roll is padded with screenshots and receipts, and Apple has quietly moved the full-resolution originals off your device to save space. Here is the order to do things in so none of that bites you at print size.
Your originals may not be on your phone
Open Settings, then Photos. If iCloud Photos is on and the option below it says Optimise iPhone Storage, then most of what you see in your camera roll is a preview. The full-size file lives on Apple’s servers and the phone fetches it on demand.
That is fine for looking at photos and bad for exporting them. Select 300 optimised photos, hit share, and you sit through a long silent download first. Anything that fails to fetch can transfer as the smaller version instead, with no warning. You find out when a page prints soft.
The fix is to switch that setting to Download and Keep Originals, then leave the phone on Wi-Fi and charging overnight. The catch is storage: you need free space equal to the size of your library, and a 60GB library will not fit on a phone with 20GB free.
If it will not fit, skip the phone. The same library is available on iCloud.com, or on a Mac signed into the same Apple account, with no storage ceiling in the way.
Getting 300 photos off the phone
AirDrop to a Mac is the fastest route and it preserves the original file, format included. Select in the Photos app, share, AirDrop. It copes with a few hundred photos but slows down badly; batches of 50 to 100 fail far less often than one batch of 300.
A cable is the more reliable route, and the only sane one to a PC. Plug in, tap Trust on the phone, then use Image Capture on a Mac or File Explorer on Windows to copy the DCIM folders straight off the device. What you get is exactly what the camera wrote.
From iCloud.com, select the photos and use the download button. Press and hold it and you are offered a choice between the unmodified original and the most compatible version. The second one converts HEIC to JPEG on the way out, which is sometimes exactly what you want.
Do not send photos to yourself over Messages or as an ordinary mail attachment. Both recompress. Mail at least offers an Actual Size option at the bottom of the compose window, and it is worth picking every time.
HEIC, JPEG, and the Live Photos problem
Since 2017 iPhones have saved photos as HEIC by default. It is a good format, roughly half the file size of JPEG at the same quality, and a decade of other software still trips over it. When a tool rejects your photos with no useful error, HEIC is the first suspect.
Two settings control this. Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible makes the camera shoot JPEG from now on, which does nothing for the photos you already took. Settings, Photos, Transfer to Mac or PC, Automatic converts on the way out, which does. Use the second one and leave the camera shooting HEIC.
A Live Photo is a still image plus about three seconds of video, stored as two files. Export it as a JPEG and you get the key frame, which is usually the right result for print. If the key frame is the one where somebody blinked, open the photo, tap Edit, and set a different frame as the key photo before exporting.
Portrait mode photos carry depth data a book cannot use, but the blur is baked into the exported image, so they print exactly as they look on screen. Nothing to do there.
Clear the junk out before you start choosing
A camera roll is not a photo collection. It is a photo collection mixed with receipts, parking spot reminders, screenshots of addresses, and eleven attempts at the same photo of a dog.
Albums, Media Types, Screenshots puts every screenshot in one place. Recent iOS versions also have Albums, Utilities, Duplicates, which finds exact and near-exact copies and merges them while keeping the best version. Run it first; on a large library it takes a while to populate.
Bursts are the other quiet bloat. A burst is stored as one stack with a chosen favourite, but exporting can flatten it into every frame it contains. Open each burst, keep one, delete the rest, and do it before you export rather than after.
Everything you delete sits in Recently Deleted for 30 days, so this stage is reversible. Worth knowing, because being ruthless here is the single biggest time saver in the whole job.
Resolution: 12MP is more than a book needs
An iPhone photo at the standard setting is 4032 by 3024 pixels. Printed at 300 DPI, which is what print shops ask for, that is 13.4 inches by 10 inches. Bigger than the page it is going on. You have headroom, not a shortage.
Even an old 8MP iPhone, anything from the 4S to the 6 Plus, gives you 3264 by 2448, which prints at just under 11 inches wide. Still fine for a full page in most book sizes.
The newer 48MP sensors output 12 or 24 megapixels by default depending on the model, and only produce the full 48MP file in ProRAW or the HEIF Max setting. A book does not need it, and those files are several times larger to move around and store.
What actually ruins a page: heavy crops, digital zoom past the optical range, and screenshots. A screenshot is roughly 1170 by 2530 pixels, under four inches wide at print resolution, and it goes soft the moment it fills a page. Photos taken of a screen are worse.
You exported 300, the book needs 40
A phone roll rewards a different instinct than a shoebox of prints. Nobody shot 40 frames of one birthday cake on film. You did, and the book needs one of them.
Work event by event instead of photo by photo. Find the cluster from one afternoon, pick the single best frame, move on. It goes faster than it sounds, roughly a minute per event once you stop second-guessing yourself.
Keep faces and rooms. Skip pure scenery, which looks identical to everyone else’s scenery, and skip the shots where the whole story happened outside the frame and the picture is just a wall.
A useful ratio is about one photo per page for a book people will reread, so 40 photos is a real 40-page book. Three hundred photos is a database with a cover on it.
Turning the exported folder into a book
Once the photos are off the phone and sitting in one folder, the work splits in two: deciding what goes where, and the mechanical labour of fitting images to frames, holding margins steady across sixty pages, and reflowing everything when you insert one more photo in the middle.
The second half is what Yujee does. You drop the exported photos into the browser, tell it what was going on, and it groups them, lays out the pages, and drafts the captions and chapter text for you to correct by chatting with it. What you download is a 300 DPI print-ready PDF. Sending it to a print shop, if you want a physical copy, is your side of the deal.
The pricing is credit-based rather than a subscription: new accounts get 20 free credits, one credit covers 1 photo, and packs run 20 credits for 3 US dollars, 80 credits for 10 US dollars, 200 credits for 20 US dollars. Your original files never leave the browser; only compressed previews go to the AI. The interface is available in English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and French, and it drafts the book text in English or Chinese.
Whichever route you take, do the export properly first. Everything downstream inherits whatever came off the phone, and no layout rescues a photo that arrived as a thumbnail.