Buki - Family Art Book

Turn children’s drawings into private keepsake books.

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Categories entered: Grand Prize, RevenueCat Design Award, RevenueCat Peace Prize, #BuildInPublic Award, HAMM Award.

Inspiration

Children create drawings constantly, but the digital copy usually becomes another photo buried in a camera roll. Buki started from a simple question: what if every drawing could feel like a page in a little family book, with the story around it preserved too?

What it does

Buki is a parent-facing iPhone app for preserving and organizing children’s artwork. An adult can scan or import a paper drawing, keep the original photo, add a title, date, notes, tags, favorites, and a short voice memory, then arrange the collection inside visual digital sketchpads.

Artwork saves locally first. Children are profiles inside one adult-owned library rather than separate accounts. There is no public gallery or social feed. Pro members can choose private, account-scoped cloud backup and protected exports.

How we built it

Buki is built with Expo SDK 57, React Native, and TypeScript. Expo Camera and Image Picker handle capture and import. A custom image pipeline finds the paper, estimates its corners, corrects perspective, separates the artwork from the background, and produces a soft alpha cutout.

React Native Skia and Reanimated power the scrapbook layouts, page curl (a custom SkSL shader), drawing landing, and tactile transitions. The paper-to-page landing was inspired by Hewad Mubariz’s Make it Bloom demo, which I rebuilt in Expo. SQLite provides the local-first library. Supabase handles adult sign-in and optional private cloud backup. RevenueCat powers the live monthly and yearly Pro subscriptions behind one verified Pro entitlement; a one-time lifetime option is already configured in RevenueCat and the App Store and will ship with the next app update.

Challenges

The hardest parts were making imperfect phone photos feel clean without erasing thin crayon and pencil strokes, making page turns feel physical without becoming fragile, and keeping local data, cloud recovery, exports, and purchase state consistent across reinstalls and account changes.

Privacy also shaped the architecture. Sensitive actions stay under adult control, destructive actions can require device authentication, and Buki avoids child accounts, public profiles, advertising identities, and mandatory uploads.

Accomplishments

Buki’s first public App Store release shipped on August 17, 2026, and four updates followed by September 2. During Shipaton, I continued shipping the family library, multiple sketchpad layouts and themes, artwork details, private backup and export, smoother page navigation, and voice memories attached to drawings.

I am especially proud that the free experience preserves the core memory: one child profile, one sketchpad, up to 20 artworks, and voice memories saved on the device. Pro expands capacity and adds premium organization, visuals, exports, and optional cloud backup without locking families out of the artwork they already saved.

What we learned

The emotional value is not only the cleaned image. It is the title, date, note, voice, and the feeling of opening the drawing again. Building in public also made product decisions more concrete: demonstrations of page turning, sketchpad styles, source-photo review, privacy prompts, and voice memories produced better questions than abstract feature lists.

What’s next

Next I want to keep improving extraction quality on difficult paper and lighting, make large family libraries faster to search and revisit, expand export options, and learn which memories families return to most often.

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