I have driven a 2018 Volkswagen e-Golf for a few years now and taken more photos of it than I would admit. They sat in my phone, like most photos do. So I tried something: I opened a chat with Claude, connected it to Cadru, and asked for a photo album.
What I asked for
Not much. The photos, and one sentence: make an album about this car, with my pictures and some facts about why it is a good one. No layouts, no page counts, no design brief.
What it made
Claude looked at the photos first, then built the album page by page in my Cadru account. Here it is, every spread:
A cover with the strongest photo, the name set large and a short line under it.
A title page and an opening photo across a whole page, so the album breathes before it starts talking.
Chapters - the car, the electric part, the facelift, the everyday - each with a short text page facing the photos.
A before-and-after table of the 2017 facelift: battery, power, range, charging. It is the part people ask me about most, and now it is on paper.
A timeline of the car across a spread.
Small handwritten notes on some photos, the kind you would write in pencil in a real album.
A back cover with a blurb and a QR code.
Then it checked its own work: text too close to the trim, photos too small for print, pages left empty.
What I changed
I moved a few things. I turned the big chapter number on its side and pushed it to the edge, changed where a couple of texts sit, and swapped one photo. That took minutes, in the same editor, because everything the assistant makes stays editable: it is a draft, not a finished file.
I also asked for small corrections in the chat - a softer grey instead of blue accents, a smaller divider, line breaks where they make sense - and watched them land in the editor while I looked.
If I printed it
I have not ordered this one - it lives in the Feed for now. But a Cadru album comes off the same press, on the same paper, every time, so this is close to what it would be: the hardcover first, then the pages inside.
Another album of mine, printed by Cadru: the cover and a spread inside. The e-Golf album would come out the same, square and hardcover.
The photos show what happened. Only you know why it matters.
Make your own
Connect your assistant to Cadru - no account needed to start. The steps are on make a photo album with ChatGPT or Claude.
Give it your photos - links, a shared Google Photos album or a folder - and two or three sentences about what they are.
Open the link it gives you, change what you like, and order it printed.
The best part is the one I did not expect: the assistant asks about the story before it lays out anything.
:@rtcarsdiary
