To turn photos into a coloring book, you convert each photo into line art in one style, put the pages in order and join them into one PDF. The hard part happens before any of that. A pile of good photos doesn't make a good book unless they turn into pages a person can actually color.
This guide covers choosing the photos, testing them and working out the cost, using our Custom Coloring Book tool. For paper and binding, read how to make a coloring book.
On November 3, 2026, we read the tool's code and did the math below. We didn't pay to run a book for this article, so the photo advice comes from how the tool works, not from a batch we tested. Use photos you took or have permission to use.
Open the album and sort before you upload anything. Line art removes color, shading and texture, and what remains has to carry the picture.
Keep these photos: one or two people close to the camera, a pet looking at you, a house from the front, a cake on a table, a child holding something big. Each has large shapes with clear edges.
Set these aside as maybes: groups of three or four, a person in a busy room, a landscape with one strong subject. They can work, and the Remove background switch in the single-page tool can help, but the book tool draws them in its chosen style with no such switch.
Skip these: dark party shots, big group photos, blurry action shots and tiny faces in the distance. Dark photos produce cluttered pages, and small faces leave the model too little to draw.
One other trick helps the set feel like a story. Choose a beginning, a middle and an end, such as packing the car, the beach and falling asleep on the drive home. Three photos of the same smile make dull coloring.
A photo book costs 40 credits up front, and you can't see any pages until you start. You can lower the risk first.
Photo to Coloring Page gives you 1 free page a day without an account, while the site's daily free pages last. Its Simple, Detailed and Cartoon styles match the book's. So take your hardest photo, usually the group shot or the dimmest one, and try it there in the style you plan to use.
If it comes back clean, the easier photos should too. If it comes back muddy, replace it or crop closer. Either way, you find out for free.
A single photo page costs 3 credits. A photo book costs 40 credits and includes up to 20 photo pages plus 10 redraws. Here is where the lines cross:
| Photos you want to convert | One by one | Photo book |
|---|
| 6 | 18 credits | 40 credits |
| 10 | 30 credits | 40 credits |
| 13 | 39 credits | 40 credits |
| 14 | 42 credits | 40 credits |
| 20 | 60 credits | 40 credits |
So the book saves credits from 14 photos up. Below that, it costs more per page, though you still get the cover, the single PDF and the 10 redraws. At 20 photos you save a third, and the book works out to 2 credits a page.
There is a cheaper mix for small books. Pages you already made and saved in My Pages can go into a book at no extra cost, but starting the book still costs the 40 credits. So don't convert 10 photos singly and then buy a book for them, because you'd pay 70 credits in total. Decide on the route at the start.
Your 2 free signup credits won't cover this. They are less than the 3 credits a single photo page costs, and well short of a book. Buy a credit pack or a plan, or use the free daily page for testing.
You choose the style once, when you start the book, and every photo page uses it. That is what keeps the pages feeling like one book.
- Simple gives thick, bold outlines. It suits younger kids and photos of one big subject.
- Detailed keeps more texture and background. It suits older kids and adults, and it rewards sharp photos.
- Cartoon gives an illustrated look. It suits a funny family book, and small differences between faces matter less.
If you aren't sure, choose for the person coloring it, since the photo matters less than the hand holding the crayon. A book for a four-year-old should be Simple even if the photos are beautiful enough for Detailed.
- Open Custom Coloring Book and choose Photo book.
- Type a title and, if you like, a name for the cover, such as "For Emma, with love". You can change both later.
- Pick the style and the language for the last page. There are seven: English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French.
- Drop all your photos in at once. Each one takes about 30 seconds to draw, so 20 photos can take a while. Keep the page open.
- Look at each page. Move it earlier or later, remove it, or press Redo.
- Press Create my book PDF, then download it.
A drawing that fails doesn't count against your book. A redo does. You get 30 drawings in total, shared between new pages and redos, with no more than 20 photo pages.
Choose the cover with your page order
The cover has no separate upload. The first page in the book doubles as the cover image, and the page list marks it "1 · Cover". To change the cover, move a different page to the front.
Since that drawing also appears inside the book, pick one with a clear subject and a strong outline. It will sit under the title and above the name you typed. Each change clears the old PDF, and building a new one is free, so try a few.
Fill out the book with free pages
A book can run to 30 pages, so you can add up to 10 free extras beyond your 20 photo pages. Press Add free pages to pick from your 40 newest creations and the 40 newest gallery pages.
A theme page between family pictures gives a child a break from faces. If you want a child's name in the book, make it first in the free Name Coloring Page Generator, though note that free in-browser pages are not automatically saved to My Pages. If it doesn't show in the picker, print it and add it by hand.
Your final PDF is one sheet for the cover, one for each page and one "About the artist" page. Download it soon, because books are kept for 30 days and then removed.
Two other routes came up when we looked at this keyword, and both suit different people.
Photopea has a free tutorial that runs in the browser. It uses Vectorize Bitmap with a Coloring book option and labels, and it recommends 4 to 20 colors. The result is a numbered color-by-number page, made one image at a time, so it suits someone who wants numbers and doesn't mind doing the assembly.
Prompted By Tea, a seller on Payhip, lists a printed spiral-bound book from your photos, with 12 pages at $20.99 and 48 pages at $61.99. The listing shows options as out of stock when we read it, so check before you plan around it. We don't print or ship books, so if you want a finished book in your hands without any printing, a seller like this is the kind of thing to look for.
Any number up to 20 per photo book. Fewer than 14 costs more than converting them singly, but you still get the cover and PDF. Six to 12 suits a small child.
Use photos you took or have permission to use. For a classroom book, ask the parents first.
We don't store the originals. They are held in memory while the page is drawn, and the finished pages stay for 30 days.
No. A book has one style. To use another style, you'd start a new book.
US Letter, in one file. For A4, try your printer's fit-to-page option and check one sheet first.
Last checked November 3, 2026.
