Mixbook’s New iPhone App Helps You Rediscover Forgotten Photos and Turn Them Into Family Books
See how Story Mode builds a photo book from your pictures and a conversation, what the app costs, and how to include older family photographs.
Mixbook Has a Wonderful Idea for the Photos We Never Look At
By Mitch Goldstone, CEO and Chief Photo Archivist at ScanMyPhotos.com
I read about the new Mixbook iPhone app and started thinking about which family pictures I’d want to see first. The app helps organize photographs in your camera roll and turn them into stories, movies, digital art or photo books. For someone whose important pictures are mixed in with years of screenshots and everyday snapshots, that sounds pretty wonderful. My camera roll could certainly use the help. I know there are photographs in there I’d love to see again. Sometimes I remember enough to find one. Other times, I’m scrolling and hoping something looks familiar.
What I like about Mixbook’s approach is that it can help you find the pictures before you’ve even decided what to make. You might open a vacation collection and realize you already have the beginnings of a book. I can see myself getting distracted by that in the best possible way.
Open Mixbook, find a few photos you love, and make something your family will want to pass around.
What Might the Mixbook iPhone App Bring Back?
The company behind the new app says it groups related photographs around trips, celebrations, and other memories, filters duplicates from its selections, and arranges pictures into timelines. You can add words and chapters, then use those collections to create Stories, Memory Art, movies, digital magazines or photo books. You can change plenty about yourself, including photographs, captions, and layouts. I’m glad about that. A crooked picture might be the one I want everyone to see. Maybe someone I miss is in it. Maybe I remember what happened just after the camera clicked.
That’s the lovely thing about family photographs: one picture of a kitchen table can bring back memories of who sat where, while someone else notices the wallpaper and starts telling stories about the house. Before long, you’re sharing a memory you’d almost forgotten. I love the way a photo app can spark that kind of conversation. Mixbook has spent two decades inventing and helping people create things with their photographs, so helping us find pictures we’d like to use feels like a natural fit.
What Would You Tell Story Mode?
Story Mode is what got me thinking about family books. Mixbook’s AI photo book creator starts by asking a few questions about your memories and what you’d like to make. Upload your photographs, choose your preferences, and decide how much text to include. Story Mode then arranges the pictures, designs the pages, and writes optional captions. You can edit the book in Mixbook Studio before placing your order. Imagine creating a book about your parents’ first years together, with photos of their first apartment, the friends they saw every weekend, and the vacation they talked about for the next 30 years. If you know the stories, there’s a place to share them.
I’d want to include the small things. Who’s that person beside your mother? Why is everybody dressed up? Where were they going? Those questions are easy to forget when you’re busy choosing pictures, but the answers could be someone’s favorite part of the book.
Read the captions and check the names and dates before printing. Ask a relative if you’re unsure. That call might give you another story to include.
What Does It Cost, and What Happens to Your Pictures?
The Mixbook app is free to download, so you can get started at no cost. Story Mode is available on the web and in Mixbook’s iOS app. Creating a photo book is free; you only pay when you order a printed copy. The price varies based on the size, cover, paper, and page count. If you’d like more features, Mixbook+ is an optional subscription that costs $9.99 a month in the United States. It includes additional digital creations and Interactive Stories, removes watermarks from digital shares and downloads, and gives you a $10 monthly discount on printed projects. The discount resets each month, so any amount you don’t use won’t carry over.
Since these are personal photographs, I also checked what the photo book maker says about privacy. The initial analysis used to organize pictures happens on your device and leaves the original files unchanged. Photos used in creations are uploaded to your account. Selected pictures and details may also go to service providers helping make those creations. Mixbook says its AI partners aren’t permitted to train their models on your content.
Those are the details in the company’s announcement and published information. They’re worth understanding as you decide what you want to create and share.
What About the Family Pictures Your Phone Has Never Seen?
This is where my mind went as I read about all of it: your phone might hold 15 years of photographs, while your family may have another 50 years tucked away in albums, drawers, and envelopes. Pictures of your grandparents when they were young, your parents before you knew them, and you at the age your own children are now. To include those memories in projects like these, printed photographs and 35mm slides need to be digitized first. That’s where we come in at ScanMyPhotos. We scan printed photographs, slides, and negatives so families can enjoy and share them.
Once you have the files, you can add them to your photo library or upload a selection to a book project. Check the dates and add the names you know. Look at the backs of the prints, too. Someone may have left you a few words that explain everything. Then try putting your mother at 22 beside her granddaughter at 22. Or put a childhood vacation beside a recent family trip to the same place. I’d want to pass that book around and hear what everyone noticed.
After 36 years in the photo business, this is the part I still get excited about. We help families save photographs, and companies like Mixbook give them more ways to enjoy what they’ve saved. I want those pictures open on the table, with someone leaning over to point out a face. If you’ve already digitized your family photographs, you have so much to work with. Start looking. There may be a book in there you’ll wish you’d made years ago.
Answers to Your Questions:
What can the Mixbook iPhone app do with forgotten photos? Mixbook says the app groups related pictures into memories and helps turn those collections into Stories, digital creations, and photo books.
How does Mixbook Story Mode make a photo book? Mixbook Story Mode creates a photo book from your uploaded pictures and your answers to questions about the memory and design you want. The app is free to start using, while the optional Mixbook+ subscription costs $9.99 a month in the United States. Initial photo analysis happens on your device; photos used in creations are uploaded and may be shared with service providers helping produce them.
How can older family photos become part of the book? You must digitize older analog prints, slides, and negatives before you can add them to a digital photo book project.
[Revised on October 1, 2026]
