Which photos to send, and what each one is for

What the photos are actually for

They are not printed in the book. Nobody's vacation photo ends up on a page. What happens instead is that a character gets drawn from them — a child who reads as the one in the photos — and that character is then carried through every page of the story.

That changes what makes a photo useful. A picture you love because of the day it was taken can be useless here, and a plain one taken against a kitchen wall can be the most useful thing you send. The question isn't whether it's a good photograph. It's whether somebody drawing from it can tell what this child looks like.

Which is also the honest limit. The result is a drawing, not a portrait. It will look like them the way a good caricature looks like them — the shape of the face, the hair, the particular way they hold their expression. It will not look photographic, and it isn't trying to.

Three photos, three different questions

We ask for two or three. The mistake almost everyone makes is sending three from the same afternoon — same light, same angle, same expression. Three copies of one photo answer one question. What you want is for each photo to answer a different one.

One: what is this face shaped like?

Straight on, both eyes visible, the whole head in the frame, in daylight if you have any. This is the one doing the structural work: how round the face is, how far apart the eyes sit, where the hairline falls, whether the ears stick out. Every one of those is something you'd never describe in words and would notice instantly if it were wrong.

Nothing on the head, if you can manage it. A hat takes the hairline and most of the hair with it, and those are two of the three things a child is recognized by.

Two: what does this face do when nobody asks?

The first photo is usually a posed one, and posed faces are a little anonymous — children have a smile they produce for cameras that belongs to no one in particular. The second photo should be the opposite: mid-sentence, concentrating on something, halfway through laughing at their brother.

This is the one that decides whether the book looks like a child or like your child. If the drawing comes back and a grandparent says it's lovely but doesn't quite look like them, this is nearly always the photo that was missing.

Three: everything that isn't the face

A full-length shot, from far enough back to see all of them standing up. Height and build, how long the hair is this month rather than in the photo you like best, the glasses, the coat they refuse to take off, the shoes they picked themselves.

This is the photo people skip, and it's the one that makes the book feel current. Small children change shape fast enough that a picture from last winter is a picture of a slightly different person.

The shots we can't work from

None of these get rejected at the door — you can send whatever you have and we'll tell you if we're stuck. But each one costs us the thing we needed, so it's worth a look through before you upload.

• Group shots. Four children on a sofa, and no way for us to know which one the book is about. If it's the only photo you have, say which child when you order — but a cropped face from a group photo is usually too small to be worth much anyway.
• Anything with the face covered. Sunglasses, face paint, a costume mask, a hand mid-wave. Charming photographs, and they contain almost no information about the child.
• Beauty filters and heavy edits. The filters that smooth skin also move the eyes and narrow the chin. We'd be drawing the filter, and you'd know something was off without being able to say what.
• Motion blur and back light. A child running, or standing in front of a bright window so their face is a silhouette. Both are extremely common in a camera roll and both give us an outline with nothing inside it.
• A photo of a photo. A screenshot taken during a call, or a picture snapped of a framed print on a shelf. Each pass through a screen loses detail, and calling apps compress faces hardest of all.
• Anything more than a year old for a child under six. It'll produce a good drawing of a younger child, which is not what anyone wanted.

The things a photo can't tell us

Some of what makes a drawing right isn't visible in any photo, or is visible in one and not the others. The place for all of it is the field at checkout where you tell us about them — the same one the story gets built from. If you only think of it after paying, email info@kater.jp from the address you paid with; the upload page takes photos, not notes.

• Whether the glasses stay. If they're in two photos and not the third, we have to guess. Tell us, and it stops being a guess.
• A recent haircut. The photos are the only thing we have, so if they were cut short last week and every photo has them long, the book will have them long.
• A birthmark, a scar, a gap where a tooth was. Say whether you want it in. Some families feel strongly that it belongs there; others would rather it wasn't the thing the drawing notices. Either is fine, and we can't work out which from a photograph.
• Glasses, hearing aids, a wheelchair, a walker. Same as above, and the same answer: it's your call, not ours. Tell us what you want and that's what gets drawn.
• Twins and close siblings. If two children appear across your photos and look alike, name which is which, and which one the story is about.

The practical bits

• Straight from the phone is fine. Nothing needs resizing or converting. Photos from an iPhone often arrive as HEIC files rather than JPEGs, and those are accepted as they are.
• Bigger is better, to a point. Send the original rather than one you've messaged to yourself, since messaging apps shrink pictures. Each photo needs to come in under 10MB, which a phone picture comfortably does.
• More than three is welcome. We ask for two or three because that's the minimum that works, not because it's a limit. Up to a dozen can go on one order, and extras only ever help.
• You can come back. The upload page takes more photos later, so if you find a better one that evening, add it. If the page won't cooperate, email them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with.

The clock on your order starts when the photos reach us, not when you pay — so an evening spent finding a better one costs you a day and is almost always worth it.

If all you have is one usable photo

We can work from one. The book will come back and it will be a good book. The likeness will be more generic than it would have been, because a single angle can only say so much, and it's the sort of difference you'll see and the child won't.

If the child is somewhere you can get to this week, take the other two on purpose. It's ninety seconds of work and it changes the result more than anything else you can do at this stage.

If they're not — if this is a present for a grandchild three time zones away — then the photos have to come from their parent, which does spoil part of the surprise. Asking for a couple of recent pictures is a small enough request that it rarely gives away what it's for. The page on buying from a distance covers what else to ask while you have them on the phone.

Taking one on purpose, in ninety seconds

• Stand them near a window. Facing it, not in front of it. Daylight from the side of a room does more for a face than any camera setting.
• Turn the ceiling light off. Overhead light drops shadows into the eye sockets, which is the one part of the face we most need to see.
• Get down to their height. Photographing a child from adult height foreshortens the face and makes every child look roughly the same.
• Don't ask them to smile. Ask them a question instead, and take the picture while they answer. The face that arrives is the one you were trying to keep.
• Take twenty, keep three. Costs nothing, and the third photo you send should be the full-length one rather than a third headshot.

How ordering works

Three steps, and the first two are done before you close the tab — nothing to install, nothing to post.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the child's name, age and whatever you want in the story on the payment page.
• You upload two or three photos of them on the page you land on straight after checkout — pick the files and you're done, no email to write. Prefer email? Send them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with instead.
• The finished book comes back to the address you paid with as a print-ready PDF within 7 business days. If we miss that, you get a full refund without asking.

One thing worth knowing before you count backwards from a date: we're in Japan, so business days here are Japanese weekdays. Weekends and Japanese public holidays don't count, and they don't fall on the same days as yours. How the 7 days are counted is written out on the refund page. If your date is tight, email us before you pay and we'll tell you whether it fits.

Related pages

If you already know the occasion

• A birthday book where the birthday kid is the main character — What to tell us so the story sounds like this year's version of them
• A first birthday present that pays off two years later — Sorted by when each present actually gets used, and what a one-year-old does to paper

More guides

• What personalized means — Name-swap, template and written-for-one-kid compared, and how to tell which you're buying
• Buying an AI-made book — Six questions worth asking any seller of AI-made books, with our answers beside them
• Last-minute gifts — What still works at two weeks, at one week, and on the night before
• Gifts by age — Age by age from 3 to 8: what shifts, and where a picture book fits
• Printing the PDF — Four ways to turn the file into a physical book, and what each one gives up
• What to write inside — Six inscriptions, what makes each one work, and where to put them
• When they have everything — Sorted by the constraint each idea respects: space, noise, screen time, duplication
• Reading it together — What the first read is like, why the tenth matters more, and what to say if they ask who made it
• Gifts across a border — Sorted by what a border breaks: time, cost, standards, sizing, and the address
• How much to spend — What each budget band forces you to choose, and what more money doesn't fix
• Giving a gift with no box — What goes in the box when the present is a file, and what to do from a distance
• All occasions — who people buy these for, one page each