A Year in Ten Photos: Better Than a Christmas Card

Christmas is when people look back, which is why the round-robin letter exists and why nobody reads it. The instinct is right and the format is wrong: a year is much easier to show than to narrate.

Ten photographs with a caption under each does the same job in a quarter of the words, and it is the one thing on this site that reads correctly right through to New Year rather than expiring on the 26th.

How to choose the ten

The mistake is choosing the best photographs. What you want is the ten that add up to a year, which is a different set — and usually a worse-looking one.

• One from each part of the year, roughly, so it reads as a sequence rather than a gallery
• The ordinary afternoon nobody photographed on purpose — these are always the ones that land hardest, and there is usually one in the camera roll by accident
• A photograph they are in, not just ones you took. An album of your year is a slideshow; an album of the year you shared is a gift
• Something from a bad month, if you can. A year that only contains good days is not a year and everybody knows it
• Nothing you have already sent them. If they have seen it on WhatsApp it does no work here

What to write under each one

One line, and make it the specific one. "Beach trip" is a label; "the day you refused to get in the water and then would not get out" is a caption. The first tells them what they are looking at, which they can see. The second tells them you remember it.

Ten captions of eight words each is eighty words for the whole gift, which is less than a card. That is the trade this format makes: almost no writing, and every word of it specific.

Finding ten photographs without losing an evening

The camera roll is where this gift goes to die. Twelve thousand photographs, no structure, and forty minutes later you have chosen two. The way through it is to stop browsing and start querying — every phone can do this and almost nobody uses it.

• Search by month, not by scrolling. Both iPhone and Android let you jump to a month directly. Ten months, one photograph each, done in ten minutes
• Search their name. If you have ever tagged a face, the phone will hand you every photograph of that person going back years
• Search a place. "Goa", "Manchester", the town their parents live in — location search finds the trip you half remember
• Look in the screenshots folder. The message they sent that made you laugh is in there, and a screenshot of a text is a legitimate photograph for this
• Check what you sent them, not what you took. Your own WhatsApp thread with them is a curated year already — somebody else did the work

If you do not have ten

Then send six. The format takes up to ten and does not look unfinished with fewer — a short album of good photographs is better than a padded one, and adding weak pictures to hit a number is the one way to make this gift worse.

It is also worth knowing that a bad photograph with a good caption outperforms a good photograph with no caption. If you only have four pictures and one story each, you have enough.

Who it is for

Parents and grandparents first, especially at any distance. A year of your life is exactly the thing they have missed and exactly the thing they will not ask for, and it is the one gift on this site that reliably gets shown to other relatives.

Also anybody you have shared a first year with — a first year of marriage, of a business, of living in a new country. A year with a boundary around it is the easiest kind to tell.

It is the wrong gift for a small child, who wants the unwrapping instead. Nested boxes is the one for them.

Send it between the two dates

Christmas Day is crowded — there is a lot being opened and a lot of noise around it. The days between Christmas and New Year are quiet, everybody is on their phone, and a year in review is exactly the right thing to arrive then.

Make one, or see one first. Free, about ten minutes if you choose the photographs properly, and the link lives for 10 days.