Back up years of piled-up artwork

The pile is real

Ask most families about their child's artwork and the answer is a physical location: a box under the bed, a drawer at the back of the closet, a stack on the desk that has quietly grown for years. Every drawing in that pile is a page of the child's history. The question is how to get them all into Little Binder without spending a whole summer one photo at a time.

That is exactly what the Add many at once feature is for. It is a grown-up tool on the Create tab, built for batch digitizing: pick a whole group of photos at once, answer a few questions about the group, and save them all.

Step by step

1. Open Add many at once

On the Create tab, tap Add many at once. The subtitle says it best: "For grown-ups saving a whole stack of creations." This is the one capture flow designed for a backlog, not for a single fresh drawing.

2. Photograph the pile, or pick photos you already have

Tap Choose photos. You can select photos straight from the camera roll, or photograph the artwork first with your camera app (see how to take a good photo of a creation). For best results, lay each piece flat on a plain surface in even light. You can select up to 30 photos per batch, so a full box simply becomes a few batches, which is still far faster than one capture at a time.

3. Let Little Binder check for copies

Before anything is saved, Little Binder compares the photos against what the family already has. If a photo matches a creation that was saved before, or if the same photo was selected twice in this batch, it is labeled "Already saved" or "Selected twice" and skipped by default. If you re-photographed a drawing and the new shot is the better one, tap "Save another copy" to include it.

4. Answer two questions for the whole batch

The review screen shows every photo as a thumbnail and asks two questions that apply to the entire batch:

• Whose creations are these? Pick the child. If the pile is mixed (the older child's drawings in there too), do one batch per child and everything sorts itself.
• What kind of creations? Pick a creation type for the group. You can fine-tune each creation later in the gallery, so a rough first pass is fine.

Anything that should not be in the batch can be removed with Remove on its thumbnail. Start over clears the batch if you want to begin with a different stack of photos.

5. Save the batch

Tap "Save N creations". The photos are saved one at a time with a progress count, which keeps even a large batch steady and predictable. Each photo is saved as its own independent creation, so one photo not going through never endangers the rest. If a few do not go through, nothing is lost, the screen shows which ones did not, and Retry the missed ones picks up exactly those.

6. Watch the pile become a collection

When the batch finishes, the saved creations are counted and the next step is "See them in the gallery." The box of drawings is now a scrollable, searchable part of the family story, ready to grow alongside the new artwork.

Sorting after the import

Batch import is deliberately about getting everything in fast, so it leaves the finer sorting for later:

• Name them. Open a creation's details and add a name: "Rocket Ship," "Mom with the cat hat," "The house with the red door." Names make the gallery far easier to search and far more fun to browse.
• Move them into spaces. A grown-up can move existing creations into spaces from the creation's details. A "Masterpieces" space for the proudest pieces, an "Art Class" space for school projects, a "Dinosaurs" space for everything with scales.
• Change the type. If a painting was imported as a drawing, the type can be corrected per creation in the gallery.

Sorting does not have to happen the same day. The backlog was years in the making, and it can be organized on its own pace, a space at a time.