Mini Zines: Print Your Photos, Fold Them, Share Them

What is a mini zine? A tiny booklet folded from one sheet of paper. Eight pages, one cut, zero staples, zero glue. You print, you fold, you slice the middle once, you push the ends together. Boom, book.

And yes, it is the fastest way I know to get your pictures out of your phone and into someone's hands. That's my opinion. I'm sticking to it.

What is a mini zine, really?

A zine (say "zeen") is a little publication you make yourself, for yourself and your people. Nobody greenlit it. Nobody paid for it. Usually it lives on paper (digital ones exist, but come on).

The mini version is the one-sheet one. A single page folded into eight panels with one cut along the middle: front cover, back cover, three spreads inside. The free browser tool dirtylittlezine.com does exactly that, and it's the tool that got ZINEKID going.

Eight panels. One cut. Small enough for a back pocket.

One sheet. One cut.

A short story of cheap paper and loud people

Fans started it. Sci-fi nerds were already making their own magazines in 1930, and Duke University's timeline points to The Comet as the believed first. By the 1960s, comics fans had their own fanzines too.

Then the copy machine walked in. By the 1970s copy shops were everywhere and zines went full do-it-yourself. A sheet, a copier, a few coins. Punk grabbed it: first punk zines mid-1970s, British punk fanzines from 1976. Bands, gigs, anger, stapled together and passed around.

Then riot grrrl. In 1990 members of Bikini Kill made a zine called Bikini Kill. It inspired Summer Star, Jig Saw and Girl Germs. In 1992 Newsweek ran "Revolution, Girl Style" and zines by teenage girls and young women exploded. BUST, Bitch and Venus Zine all began as zines in the 1990s.

Today it's zinefests, distros, small presses and zine libraries. Barnard's zine library lends them out, full of "a multitude of women's voices that might otherwise be lost". A zine on a library shelf, borrowed by a stranger. Try getting that from a story that vanishes in 24 hours.

Why you should make one

Your camera roll is a landfill. Thousands of pictures, and you look at barely any. A zine fixes that in an afternoon.

Think about what you do with a great shot now. You post it, it gets a few taps, it sinks. A zine is the opposite: small, slow, finished. It has a front, a back and an order. It's a thing you made, not a thing you fed to a feed.

• Eight pages force an edit. You can't fit the whole roll. You pick. That's the skill.
• It's the cheap photobook. Photographers have long used zines as "more affordable versions of photobooks" (Amon Carter Museum).
• Choosing is the fun part. Photographer Bill Thoo, writing on 35mmc, says exactly that about his one-page zine. He went for graphic, blocky pictures "for impact", thinking of social media on a phone. And his matte double-sided paper "prints beautifully".
• Paper travels. No login, no link, no battery. Hand it over and it's theirs.

Nobody scrolls past paper.

Same energy as the first zine kids with a copier: you don't need permission, a label or a budget. You need a sheet, an idea and a pair of scissors. Want it to reach past the paper? ZINEKID can put a QR code on a page.

How to fold the 8-page classic

Your kit: one sheet (A4 works, Photoworks uses it), scissors, a ruler or a bone folder if you're fancy. That's it.

1. Fold in half across. Short edges meet. Crease it hard.
2. Fold both short edges in to that middle crease. You get a long strip.
3. Fold it in half the other way, lengthways. Eight equal sections. Crease again.
4. Unfold everything. A grid of eight stares back.
5. Cut along the middle lengthways line, only from the first width fold to the third. That's the length of the middle two panels. Not edge to edge. Don't get cocky.
6. Fold along the lengthways line so the sheet stands up like a tent.
7. Push the two ends toward each other. The slit opens into a cross.
8. Flatten the cross into a booklet. Cover on the front, back cover on the back.

Photoworks and the London College of Communication blog show the same fold, and I used theirs. If it won't pop, check your cut first.

Printing it? One side of the sheet only (Chico State's tip). And here's the sneaky bit: some panels have to sit upside down so they read right once folded. Don't draw that map by hand. dirtylittlezine.com handles the rotation. So does ZINEKID.

Your folding options in ZINEKID

ZINEKID is the zine room inside the POLAKID app. The idea came from dirtylittlezine.com (inspired by it, not connected to it). You pick prints you have in the app, drop them on pages, write your own text, and get a print-ready PDF. Three ways to turn it into a book.

Folded 8. The classic above. One cut, three folds. Least effort, biggest payoff. Start here.

Folded 16. Twice the pages, more cutting. This one is not a one-cut job: it uses a longer meander cut with five cut segments. It also needs a big sheet. In ZINEKID that means Tabloid, A3 or A2. A4 and US Letter stay at 8.

Glued spine. One zigzag strip instead of a folded block. Fold at every panel, glue the blank backs together pair by pair, lay the cover round the spine. You get something that looks like a tiny real book.

Fair warning: this is the newest way in the app, and I haven't tried it on a real print yet. The glue part is a work in progress. Folded 8 is the safe bet.

Fold it. Glue it. Hand it out.

What ZINEKID does for you

You do the fun part. The app does the maths. Here's how a zine happens.

Pick your prints. They're already in the app. Grab eight. Or sixteen, if you're on Tabloid, A3 or A2.

Drop them on pages. One big shot across a spread. A grid of tiny ones. Edge to edge, your call.

Write on them. On a peel-apart print, flip the pen switch and type, and your words set themselves in the border in POLAKID Fineliner or Bold. The words are yours, the pen just writes them. (Peel-apart films live in the films section. Wondering why a fresh one starts blue? Read the blue-veil story.)

Pick a colour. Yellow, mint, black, any paper colour you like. No coloured stock needed, it's printed over the whole sheet.

Hit print. You get one sheet, with cut and fold marks on it, if you want them.

Fold. Cut once. Push. Book.

The room has its own spot on the home page: ZINEKID.

Now go fold something

Dig out your last twenty pictures. Kill twelve. Keep eight.

Print. Fold. Cut once. Push.

Hand it to someone.