Mixbook at 20: Making the photo book about the story, not just the photos

As Mixbook marks its 20th anniversary, co-founder and CEO Andrew Laffoon is pushing the photo book beyond its traditional role as a collection of images. His larger ambition is to make it a storytelling medium — one capable of preserving the experiences, personalities and inside jokes that eventually become a family’s legacy.

That philosophy dates to Mixbook’s beginnings. Laffoon met his co-founder as an engineering student at UC Berkeley, where the pair became interested in what he calls “democratizing storytelling.” Their first concept focused on yearbooks, where a small group traditionally decides which stories represent an entire school.

The company eventually pivoted to photo books after Laffoon created one as a going-away gift for friends.

“The gift-giving experience was amazing,” Laffoon recalled. “They cried, they said it was the best gift they ever received, but the experience of creating it was not good.”

Twenty years later, improving that creation experience remains central to Mixbook’s strategy. But Laffoon argues that making photo books easier isn’t simply a matter of automating layouts. The harder problem is helping consumers determine what story they actually want to tell.

“What made photo albums from my childhood special was adding the narrative,” he said. “Adding captions, adding color. It’s also really important what you exclude from the story.”

In Laffoon’s view, successful photo books aren’t necessarily comprehensive. In fact, “great stories exclude far more than they include.”

That means the perfect family vacation book may need the missed flight, the bad meal or the embarrassing moment everyone still laughs about — not simply another 50 photographs of landmarks.

“What are the things the kids are going to remember forever?” Laffoon asked. “What are the things that your kids make fun of you for? That’s what makes the story interesting.”

Collectively, those stories create what Laffoon calls the “family mythos” — the memorable stories children eventually retell to their own children and grandchildren.

The challenge for the imaging industry is that consumers now have more raw material than ever but fewer obvious ways to turn it into something meaningful.

When Mixbook launched in the mid-2000s, consumers using digital cameras might not have captured enough images to tell the story of an event. Smartphones have reversed the problem.

“I have too many photos,” Laffoon said. “I’ve got 150,000 photos. So what do I do?”

Mixbook’s answer is Story Mode, its new AI-driven photo book experience. Instead of asking consumers to begin by selecting hundreds of pictures, Story Mode starts by asking what story they want to tell.

A customer might tell the system that the book is about a daughter’s wedding in Ireland, for example. Story Mode can then ask questions about who attended and what happened before using those answers to help identify relevant photographs, establish a narrative, organize scenes, recommend designs, create layouts and generate text.

That represents a different approach from conventional autofill, which typically organizes images primarily around dates and image characteristics.

Mixbook has spent years researching the storytelling problem. Laffoon said the company even brought in Emmy Award-winning writers and other Hollywood storytelling professionals to help its team understand how compelling stories are constructed. Recent advances in generative AI finally made it possible to apply some of those principles to consumers’ personal image collections.

“We’re helping you create something you could have never made on your own,” Laffoon said.

The technology also raises a fundamental question for the photo industry: If artificial intelligence selects the pictures, determines what to leave out, creates the layout and writes the captions, at what point does the technology become the storyteller?

Laffoon draws a deliberate boundary.

“Philosophically, for us, one of the big things is not getting into a world where we’re actually writing your story,” he said. Having Mixbook determine what someone took away from a vacation, he added, “would be bad.”

Instead, he describes Mixbook as “a superpowered tool for the author, but they’re still the author.”

That distinction could prove important as the industry looks for ways to turn consumers’ enormous smartphone photo libraries into printed products. The problem is no longer getting people to take enough pictures. It is helping them find the handful that matter.

For Mixbook, the opportunity is to use AI not simply to make photo books faster, but to help customers rediscover the reason for making them in the first place: preserving stories worth telling again.