thesambrain

I've been slowly decorating my home. Tasteful, meaningful decorations are my vibe.

Instead of buying a bunch of (very expensive, btw) coffee table books, I thought it'd be better to have books of trips I've been on with family and friends.

So, I built and deployed Bound (makeitbound.com).

A starting point

Now, I know services like this already exist. But my barrier with them has always been the amount of work it takes to get something bound (lol).

Manually picking which photos I want in the book
Dragging and dropping them where I want them
Writing captions

It just feels like a lot!

Inspired by the local script I made to post all photos from my family iMessage chat into a Photos album, I wanted to try something different.

What if I could just drop an iCloud shared link, and the app did more of the work for me?

So that's what Bound does! It takes the photos from the link, puts them into an album, and uses AI to write captions.

From there, you can rearrange photos, edit captions, and even use "find faces" to make the captions smarter. Instead of a generic caption about a surfing trip, it can distinguish between the girls surf and Sam and Penny surf.

Or not, honestly. You could just print as-is.

Features that made this even more fun

A few things I added along the way:

A digital book. It looks and feels like a real book (well, not quite) when you swipe through it.
A shareable link. You can share your finished digital book with family and friends.
A classic style. A look inspired by those old 80s and 90s scrapbooks. You can even drag and drop your own decorations!

I built it with agents (and barely left my terminal)

I've been using AI agents to build my apps. I'm not an engineer, just a marketer having some fun tinkering around.

One of the coolest parts of this build was using Laravel Cloud CLI to get it from my local machine into production.

The first app I ever made (laracon.us/photos) was also a photo app, so I knew I'd have to deal with storage, buckets, and databases. Getting all of that configured correctly in production can be a pain.

This time, with Laravel Cloud CLI, I told my agent to ship it, answered a couple of questions, and Bound had a live production link. I wrote more about the experience here.

Blurb, the API that made this possible

A digital scrapbook is fun, but I wanted actual books I could put on my shelves.

I integrated Blurb's API to connect Bound to physical book printing.

I've ordered my first one, and it should arrive October 20. We'll see how it turns out! Blurb's reviews are pretty great, so I'm hopeful.

I've also got a $50 code for three people who want to order a book (US only). It should cover a pretty good-sized photo book. You'll just have to cover shipping, sorry!

If you use it, I'll be in touch because I want to hear how it goes and make sure everything prints correctly.

formyfriends3

The Kit (coming soon)

When I shared this idea with the girls hq, Krissy had a fun idea: a kit you can order to turn putting your scrapbook together into an activity.

The idea is that you design your book, and I'll send you a kit to help you assemble and personalize it. More on that soon!

Some memories deserve pages

This started as a fun little side project to make my home feel more like mine.