Name: Crayon Press  ·  Subject: getting the photographs across  ·  Equipment: a phone, a computer

From the phone
to the press.

The phone is the camera. The computer is the press. In between is a folder your phone already knows how to fill — here is the walk across, in three steps.

Step 1 · Get the photos onto the computer

Your phone almost certainly already copies its camera roll to your computer, through whichever cloud folder came with the phone or the PC. Turn that on once and it keeps running. Below are the three common ones; any of them is fine, and so is none of them — see the questions at the bottom.

OneDrive

On the phone Open the OneDrive app, go to its settings and turn on camera upload. New pictures are copied up as you take them.

On the computer They arrive in the OneDrive folder that Windows already shows in File Explorer:

C:\Users\<you>\OneDrive\Pictures\Camera Roll

If a photo shows a little cloud badge instead of a tick, it is listed but not actually downloaded yet. Right-click the folder and choose “Always keep on this device”, or open the photo once, so the file is really on the disk before you copy it.

iCloud for Windows

On the phone In Settings, under your name, turn on iCloud Photos so the camera roll goes to iCloud.

On the computer Install iCloud for Windows, sign in, and switch on Photos. An iCloud Photos folder appears in File Explorer — usually here:

C:\Users\<you>\Pictures\iCloud Photos

iPhones can take photographs in HEIC, which Crayon Press does not read. On the phone, go to Settings → Camera → Formats and choose “Most Compatible”; from then on it takes ordinary JPEGs, which it reads happily.

Google Drive

On the phone Open the Google Drive app, tap the plus button, choose Upload, and pick the photographs. Keeping a folder for it — “Art”, say — makes the next step a habit rather than a hunt.

On the computer Install Drive for desktop. Your Drive then appears in File Explorer — as its own drive letter, or as a folder if you chose to mirror it — and the folder you uploaded to is inside My Drive.

Google Photos and Google Drive are two different things. If the phone backs up to Google Photos, those pictures do not show up in Drive for desktop — download them from the Google Photos website instead.

None of this involves us. Crayon Press has no account, no cloud and no phone app, and it does not connect to any of these services — it never asks for the internet at all. You are using a folder your phone already fills; the press only ever reads what you put in its own folder.

Step 2 · Copy them into the drop folder

Open Crayon Press and go to Settings. Under DROP FOLDER it prints the exact path, with a button that opens it. Copy the photographs from the synced folder in step 1 into that one — hold Ctrl while you drag, or copy and paste.

Copy rather than move: a plain drag between two folders on the same drive moves the file, so the photograph would leave the cloud folder, and that removal travels to everywhere else that folder appears — with iCloud Photos, the phone included.

Two other ways in, if they suit you better: drag the files straight onto the in-tray across the top of the library, or press browse your computer… and pick them. Those two file the photographs there and then and leave your originals where they are, so step 3 below is only for the ones you put in the folder yourself.

The drop folder always sits inside your library folder and is not separately configurable. On a plain install it reads something like this:

C:\Users\<you>\Documents\CrayonPress\library\inbox

If Windows has moved your Documents into OneDrive for you — it often has — the library is under OneDrive\Documents instead. Which is why the path Settings prints is the one to trust, and why the button beside it is quicker than typing anything.

Step 3 · Press IMPORT ALL

Photographs sit in the drop folder until you say so — nothing is filed behind your back. Back in the library, the in-tray across the top of it counts what is waiting: “6 photographs waiting in the drop folder”. Press IMPORT ALL and they are filed.

If Crayon Press was already open while you copied the files across, press CHECK AGAIN first. That count is taken when the window opens; the press does not watch the folder afterwards, so until you ask again it still believes what it saw at the start.

A photograph still being copied across is not imported half-finished: the press waits for a file to stop changing before it will touch it, and counts it as still copying until then. So it does not matter whether the copy takes a moment or the cloud folder is still catching up — press CHECK AGAIN once more and the stragglers will have arrived.

What is imported is copied into your originals folder untouched, and the file you dropped moves into inbox\imported\ rather than being deleted. The press destroys nothing, and whatever is still sitting in the drop folder itself is exactly what has not been imported yet.

Questions

Is there a Crayon Press phone app?

No, and there is no account to make either. The phone you already own is a better camera than anything we would ship, and the work after the photograph — choosing, cropping, composing, printing — is work you want a big screen for.

Can it watch my cloud folder directly?

No, by design. There is one drop folder, so there is one place to look and one answer to what is outstanding. A camera roll folder is also the whole camera roll — every screenshot and receipt included — and you almost certainly do not want all of that filed as artwork.

What if I do not use any of those?

Anything that puts files on the computer works. A charging cable does: plug the phone in and Windows shows it in File Explorer, with the photographs under DCIM. Emailing them to yourself works. A memory card from a real camera works. Step 2 does not care how they got there.

Which kinds of file can it read?

JPEG, PNG, WEBP, TIFF, GIF and AVIF. Not HEIC — see the iPhone note in step 1. Scans from a flatbed scanner are welcome too, and are the best thing to do with a drawing worth keeping at full size.

Does any of the art get uploaded?

Not by us — not ever. Crayon Press makes no network requests of any kind. Whether a photo is also sitting in a cloud folder is between you and whoever runs that folder. Our half is in the privacy policy, which is short.