Pagemount vs Overlay

We offer a few types of matted album — Overlay Matted, Duo and Musée —and one of the important differences between them is whether the prints are mounted Overlay or Pagemount style. So what's the difference?

Overlay: Industry-wide, almost all matted albums are overlay mounted, so overlays may not be new to you. Details may vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but the photographs are attached behind the mat, which covers and conceals the edge of the prints. You can see this clearly in the first photograph.

Pagemount: In Pagemount albums each photograph is trimmed to fit inside the mat, exposing the core page beneath. This creates a striking key line around each of the images, which you can see clearly in the second photograph.

As you can imagine, a lot of intricate handwork goes into pagemount albums. Each page can be "free designed", and within reason each image aperture custom sized. Every image, and the film it's mounted on, must be individually trimmed and laid down on to the page by hand. Because of the time and expense involved, Pagemount is restricted to our high-end Duo and Musée ranges, which offer additional presentation options. You can opt for overlay mounting in Duo and Musée, if you wish, with Overlay Matted being the more affordable option. 

Designing a Pagemount Duo

We recommend using our free album design service, or, if you wish to do the design yourself, Photojunction. Workspace offers a simple template based alternative. Pagemount albums cannot be designed in third party software, as such software won't understand the necessary technical rules that make Pagemount possible.

Some photographers do submit a preliminary design but if so we will need to redesign in Photojunction. There is no charge for this, but an exact replication of the design submitted is not possible. You should allow for a gap of about 16mm (5/8”) gap between images. That’s a combination of the gap between apertures plus the amount trimmed off the prints. Close cropping will cause problems. Please enquire first.

See more about Duo albums in our Help Centre article.

Victoria x

Featured photography by Cinemotive, AUS.