How to make photo booth strips at home from your phone photos

A photo booth strip is a narrow print with three or four photos stacked vertically, usually with a date or a caption at the bottom. The booths in stations and shopping centres printed them about 50 × 150 mm; a home-printed strip can be a little bigger because the sheet sets the size. On A4, five strips fit side by side and each is about 59 × 210 mm. On US Letter each strip is about 56 × 216 mm.

Because the strips print on one side only, any home printer works and glossy photo paper is fine. Five strips per sheet also means one sheet makes a small batch of presents: one strip for each person in the photos.

The charm of a booth strip is the sequence, not any single frame. The best source is a burst: hold the shutter on your phone for a second while two people pull faces, laugh and lean in, and you have twenty frames to choose four from. Live Photos work too; pick stills from the clip. Shoot vertically or crop close, because each frame is roughly as wide as it is tall.

Keep the faces near the middle of each frame and close to the camera. Strips are narrow, so the edges get trimmed by the cut and anything small in the frame becomes unrecognisable. Group photos of six people work poorly; two or three people filling the frame work beautifully.

Pick a strip layout: four frames with a date at the bottom, or three larger frames with a caption and a date. Mixing both on one sheet looks good. Foldpic's Photo Booth template uses a film-frame look with a warm cast, and Party Strips uses bright colours for children's parties.

Print at 100% (Actual size, never Fit to page) on 160–250 gsm card or photo paper. Line a ruler up with the tick marks at the top and bottom edges of the sheet and cut each strip free with a craft knife, or use a paper trimmer, which turns a sheet into five strips in under a minute.

At a party, make one strip per guest from the photos taken that evening and hand them out at the end. At a wedding, a strip in each thank-you card is a small, personal extra. In a card or a letter, a strip slips in without an envelope bulge, and in a wallet or a phone case it fits where a postcard would not.

Strips also make bookmarks: one of the five positions on the sheet can be a bookmark with a full photo and a punch circle at the top for a ribbon, so a single sheet can carry four strips and a bookmark.

Round the corners with scissors or a corner punch for a more finished look. If the strips will be handled a lot, 250 gsm card resists creasing better than photo paper, and matte card does not show fingerprints.

If your printer leaves a white border at the edges of the sheet, it is the printer's unprintable margin, usually 3–6 mm. The outer strips may be a millimetre narrower on the outside edge; trimming every strip by a millimetre on both long sides makes them identical.