Family

My daughter’s nursery-rhyme tab gives every song a picture instead of a title, so she can tap a cover without reading a word she doesn’t know yet. Most of those pictures are AI-drawn. Last week I swapped one of them for a plain photo — acorns I’d picked up on a hike that same afternoon — and she noticed before I said anything about it. The Need: A Picture Has to Match Something She Knows This tab works the way I’ve written about before: one still picture per song, tap it, hear it. No scrolling list of titles she can’t read. For most songs, an AI-drawn illustration is enough — a frog on a lily pad, a rabbit under the moon. She matches the picture to a song she already half-remembers from bedtime. ...

Most of the 36 pictures in part one got one AI generation and, at most, one round of revisions — generate, glance, done. One took five. It’s 오빠 생각, “Thinking of My Brother,” an old Korean folk song, the kind of thing grandparents still hum — and one of the few songs in that whole library I’ve actually sung to my daughter myself, at bedtime, not just something we play from a folder. ...

My daughter is three. She can’t read yet, which means for months there was a whole folder of songs in her Kids Player that only I could operate. She’d point at the tab, I’d scroll the list of titles, and she’d wait for me to land on the right one. She could listen to the songs. She just couldn’t choose one herself. That’s a small thing, but it bothered me more than I expected. Everything else in her player — her audiobook sets, her story tab — she already drives on her own, by tapping a cover image. This one folder of family and folk songs was the exception, and the only reason was that it had titles instead of pictures. ...

Four parts in, the pictures existed, the tool worked, and the questions I’d been carrying about copyright were settled. This last part is about what actually happened once my daughter got her hands on it. Once the song tab had pictures, did she actually use it the way you hoped? More than I hoped, honestly. Tapping through pictures to find “her” song became a favorite activity on its own — separate from actually listening to anything. She’d flip through several before settling on one, the same way she flips through book covers on the other tabs. ...

I want to explain how the song tab in my Kids Player came together — not just the build, but the reasons behind it. Some of those reasons are more about parenting than about code, and I found it easier to lay them out as straight questions and answers instead of one long story. This is part one of five. Your daughter can’t read yet. How does she use an app that’s mostly lists and menus? ...

This is the map. If you’ve followed the series, this ties the pieces together. If you’re starting here, this is the whole system in one view — how my daughter’s photos and videos get from two phones to my eighty-seven-year-old mother’s tablet, sorted by month, for nothing per month. The Whole Pipeline [Dad's phone] [Mom's phone] | | Synology Drive auto-backup (over the internet) | | v v [ Home NAS: two backup folders ] <- never edited | hourly check copies NEW files (skips anything already handled) v [ Working folder: the "cutting board" ] | I open a browser gallery and pick the keepers v [ One "Import" button ] - convert videos to H.264 720p (ffmpeg) - resize photos - file into Year / Month by the file's date v [ Growth archive on the NAS ] | served over a free Cloudflare tunnel v [ Kids Player app -> "My Records" tab ] - tap a month - videos play continuously - photos drift by, gently zooming v [ Grandmother's tablet. Daughter's tablet. ] Every arrow except one is automatic. The single human step is “pick the keepers,” and it takes about a minute a day. ...

A perfectly sorted archive is worthless if the people it’s for can’t watch it. My two viewers are an eighty-seven-year-old and a two-year-old. Between them, they can’t manage menus, can’t type, and won’t tap through a playlist. So the watching part had to be as close to zero-effort as I could make it. The rule I designed to was simple: pick a month, then sit back. Everything after that first tap should happen on its own. ...

The whole archive starts with one simple rule: every photo either of us takes should land on our home NAS by itself, with no monthly cloud fee. Two phones, one box in the house, automatic. That’s the first stage of the pipeline. It mostly “just works” — until, one day, it quietly doesn’t. This post covers both: how to set it up, and how I noticed one phone had stopped. ...

My wife takes a photo of our daughter at lunch. That evening, my eighty-seven-year-old mother taps 2026 → July on her tablet, and there it is. No one uploaded anything. No one shared a link. The photo just traveled, on its own, from a phone to a grandmother’s screen. This post walks the whole path and tells you honestly how long each step takes. The Path, Stage by Stage Here’s the trip a single photo makes: ...

My daughter was born in 2024. By the time she turned two, my wife and I had taken about 10,000 photos and videos of her. Every one of them was safely backed up to my home NAS. And every one of them was, in practice, lost. Not lost like deleted. Lost like a box in the attic you keep meaning to open. The files were there — I just could never find the ones I wanted, because they were mixed in with screenshots, receipts, memes, and every other photo two adults take in two years. “Backed up” had quietly become “buried.” ...