My older son was four when I made the first photo book of his drawings. I dumped 80 photos into a Blurb template, hit print, and waited two weeks for the result. It looked like a police evidence binder. Bad lighting, kitchen table in every shot, no order, no captions. Three drawings crammed onto some pages, one lonely scribble on others.
I’ve made better ones since. Here’s what I learned.
Why a book and not a box
You probably have a box. Or a drawer, or a stack behind the couch. It works for storage. It doesn’t work for anything else.
Paper degrades. Tempera paint flakes off. Glitter detaches (slowly, onto everything). That tissue paper collage from Kita will not survive another winter in the basement. I’ve tested this theory involuntarily.
A photo book solves the physical problem, but it also solves the emotional one. Kids actually look at books. My older son pulls his off the shelf, flips through it, and says things like “I was really into purple.” He has never once opened the box.
Books also travel. We sent one to my wife’s parents in Germany. It sits on their coffee table. The box stays in our apartment in Zürich.
If you want to understand why preserving this stuff matters at all, the short version is: the drawing years are shorter than you think. Maybe five good ones, if that.
Step 1: Capture the art properly
Your camera roll photos won’t work. I know because I tried. Every shot had a placemat, a cup of milk, or a sibling’s elbow in frame.
Three rules:
- Window light. Stand near a window. Lay the drawing flat on the floor or tape it to the wall. No overhead lamps, no flash. Even, natural light makes colors accurate.
- Clean background. A sheet of white paper under the drawing. That’s it. Not the dining table, not the carpet, not the couch cushion.
- Square and flat. Get directly above the drawing. Phone parallel to the paper. No angles, no shadows from your hand.
This takes about 30 seconds per piece once you have a system. I do mine on the living room floor on Sunday mornings. If you already have a sorting routine, photographing fits right into it.
Step 2: Remove the background
This is the step that turns camera snapshots into something that looks like it belongs in a book.
Even with a clean white background, photos have shadows, uneven edges, slight color shifts. Background removal isolates the artwork itself. Clean edges, no table, no floor, just the drawing on a white page.
You can do this manually in Photoshop or Canva. It takes about two minutes per image. For 40 drawings, that’s over an hour of masking and trimming.
Or you can use an app that does it automatically. Scribbly strips the background when you photograph, so every piece is clean before you start building the book. One less step.
Step 3: Organize before you design
Don’t open the book editor yet. Sort first.
Pick one organizing principle and stick with it:
- By child. If you have multiple kids, separate books. Mixing siblings into one book sounds nice until you realize one kid drew 60 things and the other drew 12.
- By age or year. Chronological works well. You can see the progression from blobs to faces to detailed scenes. This is the approach that makes grandparents emotional.
- By theme. Animals, family portraits, holiday art. Harder to maintain, but it makes a striking book if you have enough pieces.
I go by year. One book per kid per year. It maps cleanly to the school calendar, and the end-of-year Kita art haul gives you a natural deadline.
Step 4: Layout with restraint
The single biggest mistake is cramming too much onto a page. I did this with my first book. It looked busy and cheap.
The rules I follow now:
- One piece per page. Let the art breathe. White space is not wasted space.
- Caption every piece. Title (even if it’s “Untitled Rainbow”), child’s name, age, and date. Write down what they said about it. “This is Mama with a hat and also she’s a dragon” is the kind of detail you will forget and deeply wish you hadn’t.
- Consistent margins. Keep the art centered with the same padding on every page. It looks intentional, even if the drawings are wildly different sizes.
- Cover page. Use their best piece or a recent self-portrait. Put their name and the year on it.
Don’t overthink fonts. Don’t add decorative borders. The drawings are the decoration. Everything else should get out of the way.
Step 5: Print it
You have options.
Scribbly’s book creator. If your art is already in the app, you can build and order a book directly. The background removal is already done, the pieces are organized by child, and the layout follows the one-per-page principle. It’s the fastest path from “I have a pile of drawings” to “I have a book on the shelf.” Print products are paid; the app itself is free.
DIY with a print service. Canva, Blurb, Mixbook, or Apple Photos books all work. Export your cleaned-up images (with or without background removal), upload them into a template, and arrange. Canva is the easiest if you’ve never done this. Blurb gives you the most control over paper quality and binding.
This route takes longer. Budget two to three hours for a 30-page book your first time. But it works, and some people prefer the control.
Local print shops. If you’re in Switzerland, Ifolor and FotoArena both do photo books. Quality is good, delivery is fast, and you can pick Swiss Post shipping.
Mistakes I made so you don’t have to
Too many pieces per page. Four drawings on a spread looks like a contact sheet, not a keepsake. One per page.
No captions. A drawing of a brown blob means nothing in five years. A drawing of a brown blob captioned “Our dog Biscuit (we don’t have a dog)” is a treasure.
Mixing ages randomly. Jumping from age 3 to age 6 to age 4 is disorienting. Chronological order shows growth. That’s the whole point.
Using raw camera roll photos. Cluttered backgrounds, bad lighting, screenshots mixed in. Take the time to capture and clean up properly. It’s the difference between a book you display and a book you shove in a drawer.
Waiting too long. I had two years of unsorted art before I started. The backlog was painful. Do it yearly, or even every six months.
When my kids saw the finished book
The second book I made, the good one, I gave to my older son for his fifth birthday. He sat on the couch and went through every page. He remembered pieces he’d drawn a year earlier. He told me the stories behind them again, sometimes different stories than the first time.
Then he brought it to Kindergarten for show and tell.
That’s when I knew the box wasn’t enough.
Common questions
How many pieces should go in one book? Twenty to forty works well. Enough to feel substantial, not so many that it becomes a catalog. For a prolific kid, be selective. Not every drawing needs to be in the book.
What size book works best? Square format, 20x20 cm or 8x8 inches. It matches the proportions of most kids’ drawings better than portrait or landscape.
Can I include 3D art like sculptures or collages? Yes. Photograph them from the front with the same window-light setup. For thick collages, a slight angle can show texture. Background removal still works on most of these.
Is it worth doing for toddler scribbles? Absolutely. Those early marks are the starting point. Looking at a book that goes from random crayon strokes at age 2 to a detailed family portrait at age 6 is worth more than any single masterpiece.
How do I get started if I have years of backlog? Start with this year. Go forward, not backward. Once you have a system running, you can circle back to the old pile on a rainy weekend. Don’t let the backlog stop you from starting. Here’s a system for sorting the pile.
