How to choose twenty photos that tell a story.

1. Decide the story before you scroll

Scrolling through thousands of photos without a plan is how an evening disappears. Choose one of these shapes first, then look only for photos that fit it.

• A timeline. Oldest to newest: a life, a relationship, a child growing up. Best for milestone birthdays and anniversaries.
• A year. One or two photos per month. Best for Christmas.
• Then and now. Pairs: the same people, the same place, years apart.
• Two places. Your world and theirs, side by side. Best for someone far away.
• Twenty reasons. Twenty moments that each say one thing you love about them.

2. How many: ten or twenty?

The city has ten main photo screens. With ten photos, each one has its own screen. With eleven to twenty, each screen slowly alternates between two photos, so everything is shown. If you are short of time or good photos, ten strong ones beat twenty mixed ones.

3. Choose the photo that leads

The biggest screen sits above the main square. It goes to the photo whose shape suits it best — a landscape (sideways) photo — and when several suit it equally, the earliest one in your order. So:

• Pick your single favourite photo, and make sure it is a sideways one.
• Put it first in your list (the creator has arrows to change the order).
• Choose one where the faces are large — it will be seen from the road.

4. What looks good on a lit screen at night

• Bright and sharp. Daylight photos glow against the night sky; dark, grainy party photos turn murky.
• Big faces, few people. Two or three people fill a screen. A school photo of thirty is a pattern of dots.
• No text-heavy images. Screenshots of messages, menus and tickets are hard to read from a moving car. One is charming; five are not.
• No near-duplicates. Five shots from the same minute waste four screens. Keep the best one.
• Portrait photos are fine. Screens are never cropped: an upright photo gets an upright lit area. A mix of shapes makes the city more varied.

5. Put them in order

After the lead photo, order the rest so the drive tells your story: the timeline in time order, the year from January to December, the then-and-now photos next to each other. End on a recent photo of the person — or of the two of you — so the story arrives at today.

6. Old prints and other people’s photos

• Prints: lay them flat by a window in daylight, hold the phone straight above, no flash, and crop off the border.
• Ask around: a sibling or a friend almost always has two or three photos you have never seen. They are the ones that surprise.
• Formats: JPEG, PNG, HEIC (iPhone photos), WebP and AVIF, up to 12 MB each.

7. Match the song

One MP3 of up to ten minutes, which you own. Choose the song for its meaning first: the first dance, the car-journey song, a recording of the children singing. Without one, our own soundtrack plays. Pick something you would happily hear twice — they may well drive round again.

8. A quick privacy check

Your photos are used once to build the world and then deleted from our server once your file is downloaded. If you do not buy, they are deleted when you leave, at the latest 15 minutes after you add them; while you are at the payment page they are kept until the payment finishes or is abandoned, about half an hour at most. Still, think about who will see the gift: leave out photos that someone in them would not want shared.

Checklist

1. Story chosen: timeline, year, then and now, two places or twenty reasons.
2. Ten to twenty photos, no near-duplicates.
3. Favourite sideways photo first, faces large.
4. Bright, sharp photos; little text.
5. The rest in story order, ending on today.
6. Song as an MP3, or our soundtrack.

See how photos look in a finished world