Make a Memory With Me: Island-hopping in the Isles of Scilly

My boyfriend had dreamed of the Isles of Scilly for as long as I’ve known him. I was more of a tropical holiday person, so I kept putting it off – until a glorious British summer arrived just as Europe began to swelter. Somewhere cooler, closer to home, suddenly appealed. The promise was hard to resist: an archipelago off Cornwall’s south-western tip with its own gentle microclimate, powder-white beaches and turquoise water, almost no cars and only small settlements. We took the GWR Night Riviera sleeper from Paddington to Penzance, drifting off in London and waking to the Cornish coast, then flew with Penzance Helicopters for the 20-minute hop across the water. After a week in that otherworldly corner of Britain, it felt only right to get the photos off my phone and into something we could hold – a Popsa Photo Book – so that one day our daughter can see the adventures she had at three years old.

Capturing our adventures in the Isles of Scilly

We touched down on St Mary’s, the largest of the five inhabited islands, and checked into the Star Castle hotel. It was built in 1593 as an eight-pointed star fortress to guard against Spanish invasion. From there, I rarely put the camera down. We hired an electric buggy to seek out deserted beaches and wandered between artists’ studios, spotting something worth snapping around every bend.

Next came Tresco, where we lost an afternoon among the palms and succulents of the subtropical Tresco Abbey Gardens. We ate fresh seafood, swam in the sea and ended each day curled up at the New Inn, a beautiful boutique bolthole. From here we made a day trip to Bryher. Some of my favourite photos of the week were taken there: our daughter, wide-eyed, as a group of seals surfaced just offshore, and again as she tasted homemade fudge for the first time, bought from one of the honesty stalls dotted along the island’s lanes.

We saved the most remote for last. On rustic St Martin’s, we stayed at Karma, right on the sand. We spent our days drifting between the vineyard, the bakery and the local jewellers, and our evenings at the characterful Seven Stones pub.

Turning the photos into a Popsa Book

Back home, sifting through hundreds of photos and weeding out duplicates felt overwhelming. But when I opened the Popsa app and went to the Memories page, the app had already done the work. Its on-device AI had gathered the best shots of the week into an album. All I had to do was start a Photo Book, choose a Large Hardcover, and the app took care of the rest. It suggested layouts, picked background colours to match the photos and proposed captions. The whole thing took barely 10 minutes.

Why these memories matter

When the Photo Book arrived and I turned the first page, something caught in my throat. There it all was – the sleeper train, the helicopter, the seals off Bryher – a week that might have vanished into my camera roll, now gathered in one place. This was the trip I put off for so many years. Seeing it laid out page by page, I had to concede my boyfriend had been right, and now the proof sits on our bookshelf. The pages I linger on most are the ones of our daughter, racing across beaches that felt like ours alone. She’s too young to remember much of this trip, but she’ll always have this book to come back to. If you’ve got a trip, a summer or a whole childhood sitting in your camera roll, don’t leave it there. Open the Popsa app and turn those moments into something you can hold.