Everfold, My Colorful World, Us in Colors and Memory Pencil: one page per photo, or two?

JCBy Julien CornilleCo-founder and publication director, Memory Pencil

Everfold, My Colorful World and Us in Colors turn each photo into one black-and-white line-art page. Memory Pencil, which wrote this comparison, makes two: a colour reference page of the memory, then the same scene to colour.

All four services make the same promise: you send your photos, you get a printed colouring book where your family is recognizable, a gift for a child from age 3 as much as for an adult. What sets them apart comes down to one question, and it decides the rest: what does a photo become once it is in the book?

Everything about Everfold, My Colorful World and Us in Colors comes from their public pages, read on September 30, 2026, with a link to each one further down.

At a glance

• At Everfold, My Colorful World and Us in Colors, a photo becomes one page of black-and-white line art.
• At Memory Pencil, it becomes two pages: the memory illustrated in colour on the left, as a colour reference page, and the same scene to colour on the right.
• On gift day, you are either leafing through outlines to fill in, or already through an illustrated album.
• Once everything is coloured, only the two-page spread keeps the memory intact next to the coloured version.

What a photo becomes, service by service

All four personalise the cover, and Us in Colors specifies that its cover photo is in colour. The difference is inside the book: what you look at, and what you colour.

The day it is given: a black-and-white book, or an illustrated one

A line-art colouring book is designed to be filled in. When it is unwrapped, you turn pages of black outlines on white: the faces are there, recognizable, and the colours will come with the pencils. With a colour keepsake page for every photo, the first read feels like an album. You see the beach, the birthday, the family dog again, in colour, before picking a pencil. For a grandparent, that first leaf-through is already part of the gift.

Does colour help memory?

Adults recognise photos of natural scenes 5 to 10% better when they first saw them in colour rather than in black and white, a measure of visual memory, not of how a gift is received (Wichmann, Sharpe and Gegenfurtner, Max Planck Institute, 2002). In babies aged 2 to 12 months, an eye-tracking study found longer attention to book pages with bright, contrasting colours than to achromatic or desaturated pages (Newman et al., Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2026). As far as we know, no study directly compares a colour colouring book with a line-art one. These two studies are about neither illustrations nor gifts: they only show that, for visual memory, colour is not a detail.

While colouring: a colour reference right there

Facing a line-art page on its own, you colour from memory, or by fetching the photo on a phone. With the two-page spread, the colour reference is on the left, on paper. A 3- or 4-year-old finds the colour of the T-shirt or the sky at a glance, with no screen. An older child or an adult takes inspiration from it, or picks other colours on purpose.

Once coloured: the memory stays intact

In a one-page-per-photo book, the colouring covers the only version of the memory: if a 3-year-old scribbles over the page, the memory goes with it. In a two-page-per-photo book, the colour illustration is not coloured in. It stays as it is, next to the child's version, and the finished book keeps both.

The three one-page-per-photo services

Everfold, based in Bristol, UK, turns photos into line drawings, one page per photo, printed in "Premium Mono Matte". My Colorful World, based in Florida, talks about "detailed line art" reviewed by a designer, one page per photo on US Letter size. Us in Colors, based in Paris, turns memories into "elegant line art", each photo becoming one page of the book.

Sources: Everfold, pricing and formats and FAQ; My Colorful World, FAQ and product page; Us in Colors, home page and photo upload page.

When one page per photo is the better fit

• If you want to see the whole book before paying: Everfold shows the full preview for free, with no card. At Memory Pencil, the free trial covers one photo.
• If you have lots of photos: Everfold takes up to 80 pages and also offers an A4 format.
• If you mostly colour with markers: My Colorful World prints on one side only, on a large US Letter format, so the ink does not bleed through.
• For the same number of pages, a one-page-per-photo book holds twice as many photos.

Our take: for a gift that is leafed through the moment it is opened

This is our opinion, and we stand by it: if the gift has to delight the moment it is opened, for a 3-year-old as much as for an adult, choose a book that arrives already in colour. A line-art book is a fine object to fill in. A gift is also judged in the second it is opened, and with a colour illustration facing every page to colour, you recognise your memories right away, leaf through them like an album, then keep that version untouched once the colouring is done.

See the formats of the personalised colouring book, compare it with a classic photo book, or read how we make it in how we make your colouring album.

Frequently asked questions

Do Everfold, My Colorful World or Us in Colors print a colour page for each photo?

According to their public pages on September 30, 2026, no: each turns a photo into one line-art page to colour, and none of them presents a colour keepsake page inside the book.

From what age can you give a two-pages-per-photo book?

From age 3, when a child starts colouring, with no upper limit: an adult colours it to unwind, a grandparent first leafs through it like a family album.

Can you see the result before ordering?

Yes: you can turn one of your photos into its two pages for free, the colour illustration and the page to colour. For the printed book, after ordering, you see every page and can replace photos for 24 hours; every page is then reviewed by our team before printing.

Method and sources

This comparison looks at one criterion only: what a photo becomes inside the book. The descriptions of the other three services were read on September 30, 2026 on their public pages, cited above, and Memory Pencil, which publishes this article, is one of the four services compared. We will update it if their books change; if you spot a mistake, write to us and we will fix it.