How to Make a Family Tree with Photos, Step by Step

A family tree does not have to start with a blank form. If you have a box of family photos, or a camera roll full of faces, you already have most of the work done. What follows is the full build, from choosing which photo represents each person to exporting something that survives printing. It takes an afternoon the first time and about twenty minutes once you know what you are doing.

To keep the instructions concrete, I will use one example family throughout. Leo is building the tree. His parents are Daniel and Sofia. His grandparents are Walter and Rose, his father's parents. Seven people, three generations, which is the most common shape by a wide margin. Substitute your own names as you read.

Decide the shape before you touch the software

Sketch it on paper first, because the sketch settles two arguments early. The first is scope: three generations or four? Each generation you add roughly doubles the number of photos you have to find, and the fourth generation is where most projects stall for months. Starting with Walter and Rose at the top is a complete, honest tree. You can add their parents later.

The second is whose tree it is. A tree rooted on Leo reads differently from a tree rooted on Walter and Rose, because the layout engine puts the root couple at the centre and everything else radiates from them. If the print is a gift for a grandparent, root it on the grandparent. If it is for your own wall, root it on yourself. Same seven people, different picture.

Pick one photo per person, and pick them consistently

This step decides whether the finished chart looks like a family or like a ransom note. Three rules cover almost everything.

Same era where you can. A portrait of Walter at thirty next to a portrait of Rose at seventy-five makes them look like they married different centuries. If you have Walter and Rose from the same decade, use those two, even if a sharper photo exists from another decade. Consistency reads as care.

Head and shoulders beats full body. At poster size, a face occupies maybe two centimetres. Full-length shots turn people into coloured smudges, so crop tight. Most phones let you crop before you even import, and doing it up front means you never redo it inside the editor.

No group photos. The classic temptation is a wedding photo with four relatives in it, used four times. Resist it, because everyone recognises the duplication immediately and it makes the tree look recycled. Crop each face out into its own file instead. The one exception is a couple's wedding portrait used once for the couple, which is charming rather than lazy.

Sofia, in our example, only has phone pictures where she is half-turned. A crop of the better one, taken from a birthday lunch, works fine. Phone photos are genuinely good enough; resolution stops mattering around print size, and a modern phone shot prints larger than a face needs.

What to do when someone has no photo

Great-grandparents usually have nothing usable, and a missing photo should never block the build. Add the person with a name and their years, and let the placeholder card stand in. In Photo Family Tree, a card without a photo shows initials, which looks deliberate rather than empty, especially if every photoless card is treated the same way.

Two things are worth doing here. First, label the placeholder properly: "Walter's father, 1901 to 1974" as a note tells future readers exactly which unknown face to hunt for in the shoebox. Second, ask the oldest relative you can still call. A name you cannot attach a face to is also the best possible question to bring to a family reunion, because it is the one thing on the wall that nobody can fill in from memory.

If the photos you do have are physical and yellowing, scan them before you build, at 600 dpi in colour. That is more resolution than a card needs on screen and it leaves room to crop later.

Load everything at once, then identify

Open the editor and drag the whole batch in. Everything is read by your own browser and stored there, so there is no upload step and no account, which means you can also do this on a plane.

The photos arrive in a pool beside an empty tree. Click one and a dialog asks who it is. Type the name, choose the relation to someone already placed, and the card flies into position. The first photo you identify becomes the root, so start with Walter.

Wire the relationships in this order

Order matters more than it seems, because each relationship you place constrains the layout of the next. The sequence that avoids rework is couples, then children, then siblings.

Start with Walter and Rose as a married couple. That single union becomes the horizontal bar that generation hangs from. Then add Daniel as their child. Then add Sofia as Daniel's spouse, which creates the second couple bar one generation down. Then add Leo as the child of Daniel and Sofia. Five placements and the tree is structurally complete; every person now has a defined position, and the remaining work is cosmetic.

Add siblings last, because siblings are the cheap additions. A brother for Daniel slots beside him on the same parent bar without moving anyone else. If you add siblings first, before their spouses and children exist, you will often find the branch has to be re-spaced later, and some tools handle that re-spacing more gracefully than others.

If a relationship comes out wrong, fix it immediately rather than working around it. A child attached to the wrong couple is invisible in the data and glaring in the picture.

Check the layout for the two failures that matter

Crossing lines are the first. When a child's connector crosses another couple's bar, the eye loses the thread, and it almost always happens for one reason: a person was placed as a child of the wrong couple, or a couple was never actually wired as a couple. Trace each line from parent to child with your finger. Two minutes.

Generational alignment is the second. Everyone born in the same decade should sit on roughly the same row. Misalignment usually means a generation was skipped in the wiring, most often when a son-in-law is attached to the grandparents instead of to his own spouse. Fix the relationship, not the boxes; dragging a card to look right produces a chart that lies.

Export it properly

When the tree looks right, export it as a PNG. The file you get is a full-resolution render, not a screenshot, so it holds up at A4 on standard paper and at poster size at a print shop. If you plan to frame it, read how to print your family tree first, because paper choice and the export's aspect ratio interact more than you would expect.

One habit worth keeping: export again after every meaningful change and keep the dated files. The tree you show at Christmas and the one you show two years later will differ, and the older exports become a record in their own right.

Why this stays on your device

Family photos are among the most personal files most people own, and the privacy model here is simple enough to state in one sentence: the tool runs in your browser, your photos are read locally and saved to your browser's own storage, and no server ever receives a copy. That is why there is no sign-up and nothing to cancel. The trade-offs of that architecture, and how it compares with platform-hosted trees, are laid out in online vs desktop family tree software.

If you are still choosing a tool, the checklist in what to look for in a free family tree maker takes five minutes. Otherwise, open /, drop in seven photos, and see how far your camera roll gets you.