Importing a photo album

Have a folder of photos sitting on your computer? Bulk import lets you add a whole album to your book in one step. Each photo becomes its own memory on the timeline, placed at the date it was taken.

Bulk photo import is available to owners and admins on any book with a paid plan. See pricing.

How to import

1. Open your book and click Media in the book navigation.
2. Click the Import photos button at the top of the gallery page. The URL is /books/<your-book-slug>/gallery/import/.
3. Choose your .zip file. The zip can contain JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, or HEIC photos. Other files inside the zip are skipped quietly.
4. Pick a dating mode (see below) and click Start import.

The import runs in the background. A progress indicator on the gallery page updates as photos process. You will get an email when it finishes.

Dating modes

Every memory on your book has a date that controls where it sits on the timeline. When you import a batch of photos, you choose how those dates are assigned.

Use each photo's own date (default)

The importer reads the EXIF capture date embedded in each photo file. A photo taken on a summer day in 2019 lands on your timeline in the summer of 2019, right alongside the memories from that time.

This works best for recent digital photos where the camera date is accurate. If a photo has no EXIF date at all, or only a rough date, it is flagged for review (see "Needs a date" below).

One date for the whole batch

Pick a single date and every photo in the zip gets that date, regardless of what the EXIF says. This is the right choice for scanned old prints: a scanner stamps today as the capture date, so the default EXIF mode would place a 1965 family reunion photo in the present. Pick the approximate year the photos were actually taken and they land where they belong.

You can be as approximate as you like. If you are scanning a box of 1970s prints you do not need to know the exact day: pick any date in that decade and sort the rest by hand afterward.

The date cannot be in the future, so tomorrow will be refused. “Today” here means today in your book's timezone, which you set in book settings.

No date (upload order)

No date is set. Photos appear at the end of your timeline in the order they were stored inside the zip, grouped under the import date. Use this when the photos have no meaningful date or when you plan to set each one individually after reviewing.

Combining photos from the same day into one entry

By default, each photo in your zip becomes its own separate memory entry. If you would rather group photos taken on the same day together, check Combine photos from the same day into a single entry before starting the import. That option is off by default and there is no cap on how many photos can share one entry.

When grouping is on, here is what each dating mode does:

• Use each photo's own date: photos that share the same EXIF capture date are grouped into one entry. Photos from different days each get their own entry.
• One date for the whole batch: every photo in the zip shares the same owner-chosen date, so they all land in one entry together.
• No date: all photos with no date are grouped into a single undated entry.

An entry that contains more than four photos from the same import displays the first photos as a grid preview, with a link to view all photos on the entry's own page. The full set is always available from that page. In the owner gallery, each photo still appears as its own tile so you can manage them individually.

The "Needs a date" flag

When using the per-photo EXIF mode, the importer marks a photo as Needs a date if it has no EXIF capture date and no recognizable date in its filename, so the date had to be guessed from the file's timestamp inside the zip or today's date.

Flagged photos appear with a small "Needs a date" badge in your gallery. Click the badge to open a short inline form and set the correct date. You do not need to open the full submission page. Once you save a date, the badge disappears and the photo moves to the right spot on the timeline.

Photos are auto-approved

Because the import is done by you, the owner (or another admin), each photo is automatically approved and goes straight to the timeline. You do not need to go through the moderation queue for your own batch import.

If you need to remove a specific photo, find it in the gallery, click the submission permalink, and delete it there as you would any other memory.

Undoing an import

Every import is tracked as a single batch. On the gallery import page, your recent imports are listed with a submission count and the date they ran. Click Undo next to any import to delete all the photos from that batch in one step.

Undo is permanent: the photos and their submissions are removed from the book. It cannot be reversed after the fact, so use it only when you are sure you want to clear the whole batch.

Limits and file formats

• Up to 500 photos per zip file.
• Up to 90 MB total zip size. A larger zip is turned away right away, before any upload starts, so you are never left waiting.
• Supported formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, HEIC (iPhone format). Non-photo files and unsupported formats inside the zip are skipped without stopping the import, and the progress page tells you how many were skipped and why.
• Individual photos are subject to your book's storage quota, the same as any uploaded photo.

If your zip is over 90 MB or 500 photos, split it across multiple zip files and run the import in batches. The per-photo dating mode and undo feature work the same way for each batch.

Who can import

Only the book owner and anyone with admin member access can run a bulk import. Contributors cannot access the import page.