5 Simple Steps: How I Turned 3 Boxes of My Daughter's Art into a 'Digital Museum' on My Phone

Even as a minimalist, I couldn't bear to throw the stack of doodles my daughter brought back from kindergarten straight into the trash.

Every drawing has her story in it: "Daddy, this is the park we went to on the weekend," "This is a monster eating ice cream." Throwing them away felt like throwing away a part of her childhood memories.

But the reality is cruel. In three years, the storage room at home was stuffed with four large IKEA storage boxes. The paper started to yellow, and some crayon drawings even stuck together. I realized that if I didn't organize them, the ultimate fate of these drawings would either be forgotten in a corner gathering dust, or helplessly thrown away during a spring cleaning.

So, I decided to act. Not to "throw away," but to "keep" better.

This is also the original intention behind my development of ArtKeep. But today I won't talk about code, just about how, as a dad, I used the simplest method to turn these boxes of "sweet burdens" into a "digital museum" on my phone that can be browsed at any time.

Step 1: Mindset Building (The Hardest Part of Decluttering)

Before starting, I set a principle for myself: Only keep the 'Highlights', digitize everything else.

Not every random circle drawn is worth physical preservation. What we are preserving is the "trajectory of growth," not "waste paper." I told my daughter: "We are going to do magic on your drawings and put them into the phone, so Grandma and Grandpa back home can see them anytime too." She was even more excited than I was.

Step 2: Prepare Your "Studio"

Don't be scared, you don't need professional lighting. The best light source in my house is natural light on the balcony.

• Time: Choose a cloudy morning (direct sunlight is too hard and creates shadows; overcast light is the softest).
• Background: Find a clean white foam board or light gray cardstock to lay on the floor. The cleaner the background, the less work later.
• Equipment: Your phone is enough. Modern phones like the iPhone or Pixel are still the best scanners.

Step 3: Assembly Line Work

I treated this as a weekend parent-child activity.

1. Daughter is in charge of 'Stocking': She takes the drawings out of the box and lays them flat on the background board.
2. Dad is in charge of 'Shooting': I stand on a chair (to shoot vertically from above) and keep the phone level. Tap the screen to focus, click.
3. Mom is in charge of 'Shipping': After shooting, if the drawing isn't a masterpiece that "must be hung on the wall," it goes into the recycling bin.

The process was unexpectedly fast. We went through two whole boxes of drawings in one afternoon, retelling many funny stories about the artworks along the way.

Step 4: Digital Retouching (The Key Step)

Photos taken often have perspective distortion (looking like a trapezoid) or uneven lighting.

I used to import photos into Photoshop, straighten them with the crop tool, and then adjust curves to remove the background color. Processing one drawing took 5 minutes; processing hundreds would drive anyone crazy.

That's why in ArtKeep, I didn't reinvent the wheel but directly integrated iPhone's native high-definition scanning function.

• Using iOS's powerful document scanning capabilities, it automatically detects the edges of the paper.
• It automatically performs trapezoidal correction (straightening crooked shots) and shadow removal.
• Or, if you have already taken photos, you can directly import from the album.

This is 100 times faster than retouching one by one in Photoshop, and the effect is not inferior to a professional scanner at all.

Step 5: Display and Share

Photos stored in an album easily get drowned in thousands of other life photos.

I divided the organized drawings into several "exhibitions":

• 🎨 Preschool Period (Those cute scribbles)
• 🦕 The Dinosaur Era (That half-year she was obsessed with dinosaurs)
• 🏖️ Family Travel Diary

Now, whenever guests come over, or we go back to our hometown for the holidays, I cast these exhibitions to the TV. Watching my daughter proudly explain her "masterpieces" to the adults, at that moment I felt, all the hard work organizing before was worth it.

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Advice for Moms and Dads: Don't wait until your child is in elementary school to start. Start today, spend 5 minutes every week to photograph this week's works. Trust me, when you open this digital gallery ten years later, it will be the best time gift you receive.