Just a few weeks ago we announced Notabli Books — our automatic photo book service. Our goal with this service is to take the hassle out of printing photo books of kids for the parents and families who use Notabli.
It’s easy to get started. First, pick which kids to include, select your favorite book color, and enable automatic printing. We’ll ship you a book every 50 photos. No Sunday afternoons required.
“Our intention was to create simple, beautiful, books that focused on one great photo per page.”
In an effort create simple books with a focus on photos — and streamline development — we opted to leave captions out of the first version of the service. This aligned with our intention of creating simple, beautiful, books with the primary focus on one great photo per page.
Though after getting early feedback from Notabli users and book purchasers, and our own usage of the service, we decided to bump up the timeline on implementing captions (and emoji 🎉)!
We thought implementing captions would be pretty straightforward. But there were a number of hidden technical and design challenges (surprise!).
“We determined that less than 1% of Notabli captions were longer than 280 characters.”
Caption Length
With one large photo per page, there is limited space to print captions. And until recently, there was no length limit for captions in Notabli. After a bit of analysis, we determined that less than 1% of Notabli captions were longer than 280 characters, and those that were more than 280 characters were typically much longer. So we omit all captions from print that are longer than 280 characters.
Emoji Support
Next up, emoji support needed to be 💯✨, and initially it was anything but…
In order to standardize in the wild world of emojiland, we chose to use the amazing Emoji One library.
With these hurdles cleared, captions are now live in Notabli Books!
This is just the beginning of our plans for Books. They’re a fantastic addition to Notabli — already the best place you can save, organize, and privately share photos of your kids.
More to come!