What to do with kids drawings when the pile takes over

Nobody dares say it, so I will: you are not going to keep all of them.

A child at school brings home between a hundred and fifty and three hundred drawings, paintings and collages a year. Across four children and ten years that is several thousand sheets of paper, and no ordinary house absorbs them. Sorting is not a betrayal, it is the condition for what remains to mean anything.

Here is the method I use, in order.

1. Decide what to do with kids drawings before the pile decides for you

The trap is not accumulation, it is postponement. You stack things in a box for now, the box becomes unreachable, and one day you throw the lot out because you are moving house.

Set a physical rule instead: one box, a single one, the size of an archive carton. When it is full, you sort. Not when you have time.

2. Sort into three piles, never two

Binary sorting, keep or bin, does not work, because it makes every decision painful. Three categories unlock the whole thing.

Keep for real. The drawings with a story, a first time, a tadpole figure becoming a person. Ten to twenty a year per child, no more.

Keep as an image. Everything that is a pleasure to see again without deserving shelf space. This is the bulk of it, and this is where digital earns its place.

Let go. The seventeenth colouring-in of the same template, the half-finished sheets, the end-of-day scribbles. You need this pile, otherwise the other two mean nothing.

3. Photograph properly, once

This is the step everyone rushes, and the one that decides whether you will look at these images in ten years.

Flat, without creases. Put the sheet on a table, not on the carpet, and press the folds out before shooting.

Indirect daylight. Near a window, never in full sun and never under the ceiling light that turns everything yellow. Flash flattens the texture of the crayon.

Straight above. Camera parallel to the sheet, not at an angle. A drawing photographed askew becomes a trapezoid that no cropping fully rescues.

Frame the whole sheet. Edges included. A folded, torn or yellowed sheet is part of the object, and cropping to the drawing alone removes what dates the memory.

Do not correct the paper colour. Kraft paper is kraft, grey paper is grey. Filters that whiten everything make the support disappear.

4. Name them, or nothing is findable

An unnamed photo of a drawing is a lost photo. Three pieces of information are needed, and they fit on one line.

The child’s first name, the date even approximate, and a title. Ask the child for the title: it is truer than anything you would have invented, and usually funnier.

Age can be worked out from the date, so do not record it. Record the date.

5. Record the voice, while there is a voice

This is the most underrated advice on this list, and the only one that becomes impossible to catch up on.

Ask the child to explain their drawing and record it. Twenty seconds is enough. What it shows, who the character on the left is, why the sky is green.

In ten years the drawing will remind you of something. Your child’s voice at four will not: it will have vanished entirely from your memory, and it is the thing that will floor you.

6. Get a selection off the hard drive

A file nobody opens is not a memory, it is a backup.

Once a year, bring something physical out of it: a framed print, a poster gathering twelve drawings from the year, a small book. It costs between twenty-five and fifty euros, and it beats three thousand files nobody will ever look at.

It is also what makes the sorting in step 2 bearable: you let the originals go more easily when the selection exists elsewhere, in a form you can hang on a wall.

7. And the grandparents

They want them, and sending things one at a time by message always tails off eventually.

The right setup is to give them permanent access rather than an occasional send: a shared album, a private link, something they open when it crosses their mind and that fills up on its own. It removes both the chore of sending and the guilt of not having sent.

Holding all this without thinking about it

The seven steps can be done by hand, with the iPhone camera and a well-named folder.

It is also the problem I set out to solve with Minot: a guided camera that straightens the sheet without recolouring the paper, a wall label with the title, the artist and the date, a recording of the voice attached to each drawing, and a private gallery the grandparents open with a code. Prints and books are prepared from the same app.

But start with the box and the three piles. That is where it is all decided.