How to turn an Apple Photos album into a photo book
Choose an Apple Photos album, refine its selection, arrange a first draft and check the PDF before printing your photo book.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
From the studio
Field Notes.
Inside the work.
What we learn while designing independent software: layout engines, private-by-default tools, and the stubborn details between an idea and a useful product.
PhotoBooks guides
How to choose photos for a book without spending all weekend
A three-pass selection process for removing duplicates, keeping meaningful moments and choosing the photos that carry your book.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
One year, one photo book: a simple family tradition
Build an annual family photo book with monthly selections, everyday moments and a repeatable end-of-year review.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
How to tell a travel story through photos
Build a travel photo book with an opening, a sense of place, small details and an ending rather than a collection of landmarks.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
What makes a good photo book cover?
Choose a cover image, readable title and simple hierarchy that introduce your photo book clearly at full size and as a thumbnail.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Captions that add meaning to a photo book
Write photo book captions that preserve names, dates and small stories without describing what the photograph already shows.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Portrait and landscape photos: making them work together
Combine portrait and landscape photographs without losing faces, forcing awkward crops or making every page look the same.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Preparing a photo book PDF for printing
Check page size, bleed, margins, image detail and printer requirements before sending a photo book PDF to production.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Why printed photos look different from your screen
Understand screen brightness, paper and viewing light, then use a physical proof to judge the appearance of your printed photo book.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Making a photo book as a gift
Plan a personal photo book gift around the recipient, collect pictures discreetly and leave time for a printed proof.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Why your photos should stay on your device
Understand the privacy boundary of on-device photo book creation, including iCloud, exported PDFs and third-party printing.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
The small moments worth putting in a photo book
Choose everyday photographs that preserve routines, familiar places and relationships alongside the big events in a family photo book.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
How many photos should you put on a page?
Choose photo density by subject, print size and page rhythm rather than trying to fit the maximum number of images into a book.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Chronological or themed: choosing your book’s structure
Compare chronological, themed and mixed photo book structures and choose the order that makes your collection easy to follow.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
How to handle low-resolution photos in a printed book
Estimate print detail from pixel dimensions, choose smaller placements and protect meaningful photographs without promising lost detail back.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
White space in photo books: giving your pictures room
Use margins and empty space to guide attention, separate scenes and give important photographs a calmer place in your book.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
Making a baby’s first-year photo book
Organize a baby’s first-year photo book around growth, family relationships and everyday life without turning every milestone into a deadline.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
A final checklist before printing your photo book
Review story, crops, spelling, PDF dimensions and printer requirements in separate passes before approving your photo book for print.
- PhotoBooks
- Practical guide
MailVault guides
Email archiving vs. email backup: what is the difference?
Separate a usable email archive from a recovery backup, and understand why a synced inbox cannot replace either one.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
How to free mailbox space without losing your email history
Archive messages, verify bodies and attachments, create a separate backup and then remove server copies in manageable batches.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
What is an EML file, and why does it matter?
Learn what an EML file contains, how it differs from a screenshot or PDF, and why open email files help preserve portable archives.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
A practical folder structure for your email archive
Organize email archive backups by account and date, document their scope and preserve the application-managed message structure.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
How to keep old emails readable without the original app
Preserve standard message files, test another viewer and record archive locations so old email does not depend on one application.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
Finding old attachments in a local email archive
Find archived attachments by narrowing the message first, then verify the file is available locally rather than only linked from email.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
How to back up your email archive to an external drive
Copy a stable email archive to a separate drive, verify representative messages and test restoration before relying on the backup.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
What to save before closing an old email account
Inventory folders, save complete messages and attachments, update dependent logins and test offline access before closing an email account.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
Offline email access: when a local archive comes in handy
Prepare full local email copies for travel, outages and old-account access, and test what works with the network disconnected.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
How to check that an email archive is complete
Verify archive scope, folder coverage, message bodies and attachments, then test an independent restore before deleting server mail.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
IMAP sync vs. a local archive: where your messages live
Understand server mailboxes, synchronized client views and independent local archives before relying on a second device as a backup.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
Why deleting an email on one device can remove it everywhere
Learn how synchronized mailbox deletion reaches other devices and how to preserve an independent archive before clearing server mail.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
Keeping receipts and order confirmations easy to find
Organize purchase correspondence by useful search clues, keep the full message and save documents that exist only behind a link.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
How to organize email history from multiple accounts
Preserve account identity, document date coverage and keep personal and work permissions clear when organizing multiple email archives.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
What happens to your email archive when you change computers?
Move an email archive with its folder structure, keep the old copy until verification and distinguish message files from account credentials.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
Building a backup routine for your archived emails
Choose a backup frequency, separate destination and restore test that match the amount of archived email you can afford to lose.
- MailVault
- Practical guide
MeatPad guides
Markdown for people who just want to write
Start with headings, paragraphs, lists and links, then keep Markdown simple enough that your writing remains readable as plain text.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Turning rough notes into a usable project brief
Turn a pile of ideas into a project brief with a clear problem, audience, scope, open questions and observable completion criteria.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
A simple folder structure for notes and small projects
Use a small set of folders for incoming notes, active projects, references and finished work without building a filing system you cannot maintain.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Local notes: what you gain and what you need to back up
Understand local note ownership, filesystem portability and the backup responsibilities that come with keeping your writing on your Mac.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
A practical Markdown workflow for blog drafts
Keep article briefs, Markdown drafts, source links and images together, then check the rendered result before publishing.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Keeping code snippets useful six months later
Give code snippets a purpose, environment, example and verification date so saved fragments remain understandable and safe to reuse.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
How to write a README people can actually follow
Write a README that explains purpose, prerequisites, setup, one working example and where to find help.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Meeting notes that lead to clear next steps
Capture decisions, actions, owners and unresolved questions without turning meeting notes into a transcript.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
When a plain text file is enough
Choose plain text for simple writing and notes, and recognize when collaboration, structure or specialist tooling needs a different format.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Moving your notes between apps without losing their structure
Inventory note formats, export a representative sample and check links, images and metadata before moving your entire collection.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Markdown checklists for everyday projects
Write concrete Markdown tasks, separate actions from ideas and keep lists short enough to review during everyday project work.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
How to keep a project journal without creating more work
Keep a short dated record of decisions, observations and next steps so a project is easier to resume after a break.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Naming note files so you can find them later
Choose filenames with useful subjects, dates where needed and stable naming rules that support search and preserve links.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
Using Markdown tables without making your notes hard to edit
Use Markdown tables for short comparisons, keep cells concise and choose lists or spreadsheets when the information outgrows the format.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
A weekly review for notes, ideas and unfinished tasks
Review recent notes, choose the next actions and archive finished work without turning a weekly check-in into a full reorganization.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
From quick note to published article: a simple writing workflow
Develop one useful note into an article through a reader question, verified evidence, a structured draft and a final publication check.
- MeatPad
- Practical guide
// Latest thinking
50,000 emails, 14 milliseconds: the search index behind MailVault
MailVault searched a 50,000-message mailbox in 7 to 14 milliseconds a query. The measurements, the command to repeat them, the plain SQL index behind them, and the 30x slowdown we shipped and caught.
- Search
- SQLite
- MailVault
Two Mac apps, one Mac mini: 589 tests on camera
One afternoon, one Mac mini, both recordings: MeatPad's 50 XCUITest cases in 405.032 seconds, MailVault's 539 end-to-end cases across 81 spec files in 16 minutes 3 seconds. Why a case costs 8.3 seconds in one suite and 1.8 in the other.
- Testing
- XCUITest
- WebdriverIO
98 seconds for eight clicks: testing a SwiftUI app versus a Tauri one
One Mac mini runs the tests for both of our desktop apps. MailVault got 1,604 test cases and 53 end-to-end specs. MeatPad got its first UI tests ever, at twelve seconds a click. The measurements, and the one structural reason for the gap.
- Testing
- SwiftUI
- Tauri
63 MB: what a Mac code editor costs when it is not a browser
MeatPad held 63 MB after nineteen hours open, and 108 MB with a 2,721-file project loaded. The measurements, the command to repeat them, the four design decisions behind the number, and the one file size where it all falls over.
- Performance
- macOS
- MeatPad
A Mac mini clicks through your email client so you don't find out the hard way
Every MailVault feature ships only after a machine has opened the real app, clicked the real buttons, and read the result off the actual screen. How the end-to-end suite works, and why it runs on a Mac mini instead of the machine we work on.
- Testing
- Tauri
- MailVault
Gmail rations your own mail: the 2,500 MB daily download limit
Google caps IMAP downloads at 2,500 MB per user per day, and locks the account for up to 24 hours when you cross it. What that means for anyone archiving a large mailbox — and how a backup should behave when the server says stop.
- Gmail
- IMAP
- MailVault
What is Graphic Meat? Not vegan, not a butcher — it’s software.
We sell no food and harm no animals. The name is graphical satire: meat stands for the substance of the work — the shipped result of coding you can actually chew on.
- Studio
- Satire
- Naming
The web solved automatic masonry. Why haven’t photobooks?
Browsers have flowed uneven content into balanced grids for years. Printed albums still ask people to drag every photograph into a box. The missing piece isn’t layout—it’s judgement.
- Automatic layout
- Computational design
- PhotoBooks