Why I built OneZine

I have been photographing for decades. The best of my photos lived on a hard drive: backed up, organised, and unseen.

I always meant to print them. A book, a zine, something for the table. Someday. But someday never came, because someday is just a pile of decisions I kept putting down. Which photos. What layout. What paper. Which print shop. How much of a weekend it would swallow.

So I removed the decisions. All of them. I built a system that takes the photos, composes every spread, corrects and resizes each image to print resolution, and prepares the file for the print. One layout, designed carefully once, so it never has to be designed again.

The first OneZine I printed was my own. It changed how I shoot. A photograph that ends up on paper counts differently from one that ends up in a folder, and knowing a zine waits at the end of the month changes what I look for through the viewfinder.

This is the tool I wanted and could not find, so I built it. Now I pick the photographs, upload them, and add a title. Fifteen minutes later there's a zine on the way to print.

Petr Gardian, OneZine