A mirror wall, a hair dryer, some headbands you’ll pretend you didn’t pick, and a screen asking you to choose a frame. That’s a Korean self-photo studio. It’s usually a room of about 33 square meters with two or three booths in it and nobody behind a counter, and you walk out with a ne-keot (네컷, “four cuts”), your best shots printed together on one strip.
Now count them. A 2025 report by the Korean business outlet Bizhankook found five of these studios within 130 meters of each other in Seongsu-dong, and another five within 130 meters near Hongik University Station.
The sticker photo booth, back with a QR code
Anyone who was a teenager in Korea in the 1990s will recognize this format. Back then it was seutikeo sajin (스티커사진, “sticker photos”). The current version, as Edaily described it in 2024, is the same idea with sharper images, a lot more frames, and a QR code that sends the files to your phone. The startup boom began in 2021.
The QR code is pretty much the whole trick, if you ask me. You get a paper strip to keep and a file to post, and the old sticker photos only ever gave you the paper. By the end of 2023, the top brands, led by Life4Cut, Photoism and Photogray, had 1,006 stores combined, up from 827 a year earlier. The industry’s own estimate in 2024 was about 3,000 studios across some 50 brands.
Five booths in 130 meters
National Tax Service figures released in February 2026 show how fast it overshot. They put the instant photo booth business at 319.6 billion won in sales for 2024, 2.4 times the 2020 figure. Closures went from 176 in 2020 to 611 in 2024.
Life4Cut, usually named as the leading brand, grew from 239 stores in 2021 to 401 in 2022, then shrank to about 330 by mid-2025. Photo kiosks that cost more than 10 million won new were showing up secondhand for 2 to 3 million won as studios closed. Honestly, that resale price tells you more about the market than any sales figure.
So the booths sell frames instead
When there are five studios on one block, I don’t think the machine is why anyone walks into a particular one. The frame is. When a K-pop act has a comeback, or an actor has a new drama or a birthday, agencies team up with booth brands on limited-edition frames that only show up at certain locations for a limited time.
The brands are leaning into it. After an operating loss in 2024, Life4Cut’s operator told Bizhankook it was restructuring into a photo platform built around fandom, content and commerce.
So if it were me, I’d decide on the frame first and let that pick the booth. The process from brand to brand is close enough that you won’t miss anything: pay, choose the frame, pose, pick your shots, print. Scan the QR code before you leave and save the files soon, because the download link expires.
The figure I’ll be watching for is the 2025 closure count. The February tax data stops at 2024.