Your baby's first year deserves more than a camera roll. Here's how to do it properly, without it becoming another thing on the list.
Here's something that happens to almost every new parent, without exception. You take an extraordinary number of photos in the first few weeks. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. The lighting in the hospital at 2am somehow doesn't stop you. Nothing does. And then life, glorious, relentless, sleep-deprived life, takes over and the photos just sit there. On your phone. On your partner's phone. Duplicated across both your cameras because you weren't sure who got the better shot.
You tell yourself you'll do something with them. Soon. Soon is a very popular word in the first year of parenthood. It doesn't mean much.
I built DOSSI because I believe those photos deserve better. Not because of sentimentality, though there's plenty of that, but because the first year of your baby's life is genuinely irreplaceable and a camera roll is a terrible place to keep irreplaceable things.
So. Let's talk about what to actually do with them.
First, know the difference: baby photo album vs baby photobook.
These two things sound the same. They're not, and the difference matters when you're deciding what's right for you.
A baby photo album is a physical album you fill yourself. You print your photos, Polaroids, standard prints, whatever format you love, and you place them in. The beauty of an album is that it holds everything: not just the photos, but the bits and pieces alongside them. The ultrasound from week 12. The hospital wristband you definitely kept. The discharge card from the midwife. The little footprint ink print that's been sitting in your nappy bag for three months because you can't bring yourself to throw it away but have no idea what to do with it.
A baby photobook is a printed, bound book designed by you on a platform, then printed and delivered to your door. The images are professionally printed on linen-covered pages. It's a finished object, beautiful from the first page to the last, and it requires zero arts and crafts on your part.
Both are heirlooms. Both belong on a shelf. They just do different things and honestly? The first year of your baby's life is big enough for both.
The DOSSI Baby Album: for everything the first year holds
The DOSSI Baby Album is the one you fill yourself, and it was designed specifically with the chaos and tenderness of new parenthood in mind.
It holds up to 160 Polaroids or 80 standard prints on self-adhesive pages. No glue, no corners, no craft project energy required. But what makes it different from any other photo album is the archival inserts. These are designed to hold exactly the things you can't bring yourself to throw away: hospital cards, ultrasound scans, the wristband, the birth announcement, the things that aren't photos but are somehow the most important documents you own.
The cover is oat linen, warm, tactile, the kind of material that ages beautifully rather than cheaply. It's foil embossed. It has weight to it. When you pick it up, it feels like what it is: something worth keeping forever.
It's designed in Melbourne. It doesn't live in a drawer. It lives on a shelf, alongside your books and your ceramics and the other things in your home that earned their place there. That was always the point.
The DOSSI Baby Photobooks: the whole first year, in four volumes.
A little backstory before I get into the details, because I think it matters. The Baby Photobook Set was the product that started all of this. Our founding product. The thing that launched the brand back when we were called Hey Baby Print Co. It's what built our community, proved there was a real appetite for something more considered in the photo product space, and made me believe this was worth building properly.
The fact that it's coming back on a completely rebuilt platform, better in every way, feels like a full circle moment. I genuinely cannot wait.
The DOSSI Baby Photobooks are a set of four linen hardcover books, one for each quarter of your baby's first year. Zero to three months. Three to six. Six to nine. Nine to twelve. Each book is titled by the months it holds, and together they tell the complete story of a year that goes faster than anyone warns you it will.
Each book holds 140 to 160 of your best images from that season, professionally printed on 21x21cm pages, in your choice of grey or sand linen hardcover. They come in a custom acrylic slipcase designed to keep all four books together, protected, and looking exactly as considered on your shelf as they deserve to.
They're designed and printed right here in Melbourne. And they are, genuinely, one of the most beautiful things I've ever made.
Which one is right for you?
If you want something you can start filling right now, a home for the ultrasounds, the Polaroids, the hospital wristband, the printed photos as they come, the Baby Album is the one. It's ready. It's waiting. And it's the kind of gift that makes people cry in the best way possible.
If you want a complete, professionally printed record of the entire first year, all four quarters (max number if photos) all the best images, bound beautifully and stored together, the Baby Photobook Set is coming and the waitlist is the best place to be when it does.
If you can't decide? You're not alone. The album holds the bits and pieces. The photobooks hold the photos. They were made to exist together, but individually do their job.
The first year is short. Brutally, beautifully short. But you have the photos, hundreds of them, sitting on your phone right now. They deserve somewhere better to live.
That's what DOSSI is here for.
Pop your details here so we can email you as soon as the new book building platform launches (SO SOON).
