Python

I scan my daughter’s picture books, page by page, so she can flip through them on a tablet the same way she flips through the paper ones. Turning a folder of page photos into something that reads like an actual book means two things: straightening out crooked, badly cropped scans, and getting the pages into the right order — cover first, then left-right spreads, back cover last. I asked Claude Code to do both. It could do both. But doing both, every time, on every new book, was burning through my usage far faster than the work seemed to justify. ...

I did this once already for audio. Transcripts turned hundreds of hours of recordings into something you could search — type a phrase, jump straight to the moment. This time the black box wasn’t audio. It was paper. The Need: A Book You Can’t Search We have a set of printed booklets — a sermon series, scanned page by page from the original book. The content is good. The problem is the same problem the audio had before transcription: you remember there’s a page about a certain verse, but not which of the hundred-plus pages it’s on. A scanned book is just a folder of JPGs. You can look at every page, one at a time, or you can give up and guess. ...

Here’s a problem that sounds harder than it is. New files arrive on the cutting board every hour. I sort them in passes, over several days. The automatic check keeps copying. So how does the same photo never get imported twice? No database. One small ledger, plus a cheap shortcut, do the whole job. The Ledger Does the Real Work When the hourly check copies a file onto the cutting board, it writes one line in a small record — a plain text ledger I’ve been calling R throughout this series. ...

Here’s the plan I was sure would work: point an AI at a folder of thousands of mixed photos, give it a few pictures of my daughter, and let it pull out every photo of her automatically. No more manual sorting. It didn’t work. And the reason it didn’t work is interesting enough that I want to tell it straight, including the part where I was wrong. The Idea Face recognition is a solved problem, right? Phones do it. The plan was: ...

Everything else in this pipeline runs by itself. This is the one part that needs me: looking at the day’s new files and choosing which ones are actually my daughter, worth keeping in her archive. For that I built a small browser gallery. It shows the files waiting on the cutting board, I tap the keepers, and press a button. That’s the whole job. But a few small choices made it pleasant enough to actually use every day. ...

There’s a boring step in the middle of this pipeline, and it’s the step that used to kill the whole thing. Photos land on the NAS from two phones. Before I can sort them, someone has to copy the new ones onto the working folder — the cutting board — while skipping everything already handled. That’s dull, repetitive, and easy to forget. For two years, “I’ll copy them over later” was where the process died. ...

This is the post the whole series turns on. Everything before it is the problem; everything after it is possible because of the idea here. For two years I couldn’t sort my daughter’s photos. Not because there were too many — because I was trying to do it in the wrong place: inside the backup folder itself. Why Sorting Inside a Backup Is a Trap My phone auto-backs up to a folder on my NAS. My wife’s phone backs up to another. Those folders are my only copies of my daughter’s baby years. Naturally, I wanted to open them and pick out her best moments. ...

My daughter is three. My phone takes about 6,000 photos and videos a year — maybe more. I don’t have 6,000 interesting shots. Most of it is accidental taps, blurry motion, seventeen near-identical photos of the same bread I was about to eat. But somewhere in that pile are the clips I actually care about: her first steps, her laughing at something she found hilarious at the time, moments my wife and I know we’ll want to see again when she’s older. ...

My phone has backed up about six thousand photos and videos from 2025 alone. On my PC, I run a local browser tool — pick_yeju.py — that lets me scroll through them, pick the ones worth keeping, and copy them into my daughter’s media library on our NAS. The files are sorted oldest-first. Six thousand of them. That’s about ninety pages at sixty per page. The problem: every time I restarted the tool, it opened at page one. I’d have to scroll back through to wherever I’d left off the previous session. Ten, twenty, thirty pages — just to find my place again. ...

There is a 1974 German theology book that exists in almost no library. One copy lives with its owner here in Korea. He wanted it translated into Korean. I offered to help. First step: get it scanned properly. I visited a professional scanning company. They said the book needed to be taken apart — pages separated, binding cut — before they could run it through their equipment. I relayed this to the owner. He said: do not cut this book. The scanning company said: then we cannot help you. ...