Apple iPhoto Books

» see apple.com/mac/iphoto as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed iphoto books. wrong stack for the first half of its life, wrong country for the print fulfillment in the second half. iphoto launched in january 2002 with the book service baked in, and the fulfillment was a us-and-a-few-european-countries kind of thing. ankara was not on the shipping list in any year that mattered. it was a mac feature in a windows-default household, behind a fulfillment pipeline that did not reach me.

the product was a quiet one. inside iphoto, then later inside the photos app on macos, was a button labeled "book" or "calendar" or "card". you would lay out pages with photos from your library, pick a hardcover or softcover, and apple's order screen would charge a card and ship the finished object. apple was running the fulfillment itself, contracted to print partners, with a level of polish that meant the books actually looked nice when they arrived. it stayed embedded in every consumer mac that came with ilife for sixteen years.

the service never made the leap to ios. it stayed on macos the whole time, while iphoto was renamed to photos and the ilife suite slowly stopped being a suite. apple announced the end in july 2018. existing orders had to be placed by 30 september 2018. after that date the buttons disappeared. apple pointed users at third-party extensions that plugged into the photos app via the projects api introduced in macos high sierra.

~ the record ~

~ what got buried with it ~

what died on 30 september 2018 was not the photo book as a category. mimeo, motif, shutterfly, printique, all of those continued, several of them showed up as the recommended replacements inside the photos app itself. what died was apple's own fulfillment, the moment when a hardcover landed in a us mailbox bearing apple's quiet certificate of taste. you could still print a photo book after that date. you just could not print one from inside apple.

~ the long tail ~

the bigger pattern is that apple was getting out of the operating-a-service business in any place where it could push the work to a partner extension. the projects api in high sierra was the giveaway, even before the july 2018 announcement. apple wanted the photos app to be a platform other people printed books from, not a print shop in its own right. the same pattern came for itunes, for the bookstore inside imovie, for any vertical that needed apple to keep a fulfillment contract running. iphoto books was the first of those services to go cleanly, with a final order date on the screen and a thirty-day window to clear it.

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