Walk down almost any busy street in Seoul and you’ll pass one, sometimes two or three in a row: a small, brightly lit booth advertising “인생네컷” — four cuts, four photos, ready in under a minute. In Seongsu, five of these booths sit within 130 meters of each other. Near Hongik University, another five are packed into a similarly tight stretch.
Here’s the part that doesn’t quite add up at first: the industry’s total revenue has grown 2.4x since 2020. Over that same stretch, the number of stores shutting down has grown 3.5x. Both things are true at once.
It Started With a Subway Passport Photo Machine
Life4Cuts (인생네컷) — the brand that basically became the generic word for this entire category — was founded by Lee Ho-ik, who reportedly got the idea after noticing a passport photo machine in a subway station. He’d also seen a sticker-photo vending machine somewhere in the provinces branded “인생네컷” (“four cuts of your life”) and just bought the rights to the name. The first booth opened in Daegu’s Dongseong-ro in 2017. It’s now the brand people default to saying even when they mean a competitor’s booth — the way some people say “Kleenex” for any tissue.
Too Many Booths, Not Enough Customers
The basic math is simple: everyone saw how well the first wave of booths did, and everyone opened one. A low-effort, unmanned business model made it an easy franchise to buy into, so competing brands — Photoism, Haru Film, Photogray, Photosignature — all rushed into the same commercial strips at once. Now it’s common to find five or more booths within a two-minute walk of each other, all splitting the same foot traffic.
The result: Life4Cuts franchisees are, on average, making less in annual revenue than they spent to open the store in the first place. Haru Film capped its own franchise expansion once it crossed 100 locations, deciding it wasn’t worth adding more. Used photo kiosks — barely a year old — have started flooding secondhand marketplaces as stores fold. One industry insider summed it up bluntly: the market is saturated, and what’s left is a shakeout of who survives.
So the Format Keeps Changing Instead
With plain four-cut booths this crowded, newer entrants have started competing on format instead of just location. Reverie Black in Seongsu prints oversized poster-size shots instead of the classic small strip — reviewers describe it as “Life4Cuts, but big.” Cambag, also in Seongsu, leans into “디카 감성” — recreating the specific look of the point-and-shoot digital cameras everyone carried in the early-to-mid 2000s, before phone cameras took over.
Life4Cuts itself has responded by looking overseas rather than opening more Seoul locations — it now runs roughly 230 stores across 19 countries, with new markets in France and Romania this year, on top of its existing presence in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan.
I used to do the classic four-cut version constantly with friends — it’s a little less automatic for me now, but for years, “let’s get a 인생네컷” was just what you did at the end of hanging out, no discussion needed. If you’re visiting and want to try one, you don’t need a reservation or even much Korean — just walk in, pick a frame, follow the on-screen prompts, and four photos print out before you’ve finished posing for the fifth one. Just don’t expect the first booth you see to still be there next year.
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