Keepsy goes beyond Instagram, pulling in public photos to create giftable calendars

FedEx knocks on my door the other day, delivering a package. This isn’t unusual at all, as it happens at least a few times a week, but I wasn’t expecting anything that day. So I opened the door, grabbed the package and popped it open to find this inside:

“OK,” I thought, “someone has put together a calendar full of my Instagram photos. That’s pretty slick.” So naturally I thought that it was Calendargram, who we wrote about last week. But then I realized that some of the photos on there weren’t from Instagram, so my curiosity was piqued.

Come to find out, it’s from Keepsy, a company that tends to focus on printed photo albums. Apparently, the company now does 12 and 18-month calendars, too. But instead of focusing on you, Keepsy lets you create calendars for others by gathering their publicly-shared photos from sites like Flickr, Picasa and Facebook, not just Instagram.

By giving you access to import photos from the Instagram accounts of your friends, Keepsy is taking the customized gift idea to a place that we’ve not really seen before. In the image above, the Keepsy team figured out that I got married in August, so they pulled a couple of the photos from then that would be meaningful and created one of the calendar pages from it. Nice trick, and it got an “awww” out of my wife for bonus points.

Of course this opens up a slight door of questioning about having the right to the photos. As Keepsy’s Blake Williams explains to us:

“It’s important to note that the person must be one of your Instagram followers if you want to access their photos — so you can’t make a book or calendar out of just anyone’s pics. You also need accept terms that you have (or *would* have, if it’s a surprise) their permission to print their photos. This limits the scope of givers and receivers to close friends and relatives — which is perfect for the gift scenario — but doesn’t allow, say, Justin Bieber or Snoop Dogg fans to go create celebrity fan books, or for errant creeps on the service to just highjack your photos without permission.”

The calendars themselves are of good quality, printed on a matte card stock and wire-bound. Photo reproduction is also quite good, with colors staying true-to-frame.

Pricing for the calendars is reasonable — $20 for 12 months, or $26 for 18 — and shipping is quick at a 5 to 10 day turnaround. Oh, and Keepsy also ships to 22 countries, which is a move that we don’t see nearly often enough.

So as you’re searching for gifts this year, keep Keepsy on your radar. By focusing on giving rather than getting, the company is definitely heading in the right direction for the holidays.