With Recently, Receive A Monthly Printed Magazine With Your Camera Roll

Many, many startups let you send postcards and print photo albums from your phone, but this startup is different. Recently is a subscription service to receive a monthly magazine with your best photos from your camera roll. It will cost you $9 a month with each magazine showcasing 100 photos.

Once you have the iOS app, the startup will ask you to review your camera roll once a month. If you have more than 100 photos, the app tries to automatically curate the best ones first.

You can then manually select and remove pictures, but this step is totally optional. Once you’re done, you hit upload and that’s it. A paper magazine will show up on your doorstep a few days later.

There isn’t anything revolutionary behind this startup, but I find this approach refreshing. Now that everyone takes dozens of pictures a month, you don’t have time to review these photos and select the best ones. Most of the time, your best photos end up in your camera roll in the middle of hundreds of other pictures.

Forcing you to regularly print photos lets you take a step back and actually look at your photos. And at the same time, printing a Recently edition doesn’t take hours. In just a few minutes, you can review the selection and send these photos right from your phone.

This is just a magazine, this isn’t a beautiful photo album. It doesn’t matter if some of your photos are blurry, because your camera roll tells a story.

Looking at the pictures from your last vacation brings back many memories. And flicking through your camera roll is the best way to remember long-forgotten friends and places. Timehop lets you remember what you did last year and the years before that.

Recently can do the same thing, with the advantage that you can physically hold some of your best memories. While there isn’t any word in these magazines, Recently tells a much more personal story than your favorite magazine subscription.