A private, offline catalog for your souvenir spoons. (Fridge magnets have their own app — DKMagnetVault.) This guide walks through every feature and setting, step by step.
In a hurry? The whole app in one line: on the home screen tap +, choose Take photo, drag the box around your spoon, tap Remove background, then Save. Everything below is optional.
The first time you open the app you'll see a one-time welcome screen explaining the three things it does — snap a photo and it cuts the spoon out automatically, organize and explore your collection, and stay private & offline. It offers two ways in: tap No — get started offline to jump straight into the app (everything works without an account), or Yes — set up Claude AI if you want to set up optional auto-tagging first (you can always do this later in Settings). You can also tap the New here? Read the guide link to open this guide. You won't see this welcome screen again.
You can reopen this guide any time from the ⋮ (More) menu → Settings → User guide.
The app opens to your collection — empty at first, with "Nothing here yet" and a tip to tap the round + button.
No sign-up, no permissions to grant. There's no account and no login. The app never asks for camera, photos, or location permission at runtime — it uses your phone's built-in camera app and photo picker, which handle their own access. Everything works offline out of the box.
2. Adding a spoon
Tap the + button (bottom-right) to open the Add sheet. It asks two quick questions.
Step 1 — Choose a source
Take photo — use your camera.
Pick from gallery — choose existing photos.
Add manually — skip the photo and just type in the details.
Step 2 — How many
After Take photo or Pick from gallery, choose the shape of what you're adding:
Choice
What it does
One spoon
One spoon per photo. Camera: one shot → opens straight into the editor. Gallery: you can actually pick several photos — each becomes its own spoon, and the app walks you through editing them one after another.
Several spoons
One photo that holds several spoons — the app finds each one and splits it into separate spoons (see the Split editor below).
3D Spoon
A few photos of one spoon from different angles — the app builds a swipeable 3D spin (see §6).
Splitting one photo of several spoons
If you chose Several spoons, the Split editor opens. It shows a box around each spoon it found ("N spoons found").
Rotate the photo upright with the corner Rotate left/right buttons if needed.
Tap a box to select it, then drag to move or drag a corner to resize. Pinch to zoom the photo, drag to pan, or twist two fingers to straighten a tilted photo.
Use + Add to add a box the app missed, Delete to remove the selected box, or Split to cut one box into two (for spoons detected as one).
Tap Done (N) — each box becomes its own spoon, and you're walked through reviewing them.
3. The cut-out tools
Whenever you take or choose a single photo, the app immediately opens Confirm the spoon — a box you place around one spoon so it can cut away the background.
Rotate the photo upright with the rotate-arrow icons in the top corners.
Drag the box so it surrounds the spoon, keeping a little background visible on every side (that helps the cut come out clean).
Pinch to zoom, drag to pan, or twist two fingers to fine-straighten a tilted photo.
Tap Remove background. Usually the app cuts the spoon out and adds a subtle white "die-cut sticker" border — die-cut means the clean cut-around-the-edge outline you see on a real sticker — and you'll see "Background removed — Crop or Undo edits if needed." If it can't cleanly separate the spoon (for example the box hugs the spoon's edges, or the background is busy), it instead keeps a plain crop of your box and shows a message suggesting you leave a little background around the spoon and try again.
You can also tap Cancel (bottom-left) in this box to keep the plain photo and skip background removal for now.
Rectangular tiles come out level and rounded. Flat photo-tile spoons are automatically straightened, given clean edges and softly rounded corners, and the sticker border wraps them evenly — so a slightly crooked or angled shot still looks tidy. Sculpted shapes (like a bowl) keep their natural outline.
Back on the editor, once a photo exists you get the full tool row:
Button
What it does
Photo
Take a new picture (replaces the current one and re-opens the cut-out box).
Choose
Pick a different photo from the gallery.
Remove background
Re-open the box and cut out the background again.
Crop
Trim the photo — keep whatever's inside the box, then Done.
Rotate
Turn the photo 90° clockwise each tap.
Undo edits
Undo the cut/crop/rotate and go back to the original photo.
Touch up edges
Hand-fix the cut-out edges with a brush (see below).
Touch up edges (the brush)
Available right after a successful Remove background. It opens a full-screen brush so you can perfect the edges:
Erase (red) removes leftover background stuck to the spoon.
Restore (green) paints the real photo back where the cut removed too much.
Use the Brush slider for size; one finger paints, two fingers zoom/pan.
Undo reverts the last stroke (up to 4). Apply bakes it in; Cancel discards all strokes.
Nothing is saved until you tap Save at the top of the editor. Leaving the screen without saving discards the new photo and edits.
4. Filling in the details
Below the photo, add as much or as little as you like — every field is optional except that a spoon is more useful with a place. Fields include:
Title, and the three location fields Country, State / Region, and City (City offers offline autocomplete as soon as you type a couple of letters; filling in the state or country first just narrows the suggestions).
Existing trip (dropdown) or …or create a new trip to group spoons by journey.
Tags (comma-separated), Event (e.g. "Lantern Festival"), Date acquired (tap Pick), Who gifted it, Where bought, Price + Currency, Material, Condition, and free-text Notes.
Favorite toggle to star it.
After adding a photo you may see a "Photo taken <date> — use as Date acquired?" card; tap Use date or No (a camera photo with no embedded date suggests today's date). When you're done, tap Save. With cloud AI on, Save may briefly read Classifying… and stay disabled for a moment while Claude analyzes the photo — just wait and it returns to Save.
New items are saved as a Draft (they show a "Draft" badge) until you review them. On the detail screen a Draft — tap Edit to finish details banner takes you back here to finish.
5. Optional Claude AI (auto place & tags)
The app is fully usable offline. If you want it to suggest the place and tags automatically, you can turn on cloud AI, which uses your own Anthropic (Claude) API key. It's off by default.
Cloud AI sends each item photo to Anthropic (using your key, billed by Anthropic — a fraction of a cent per photo on the cheapest model). It's for adults (18+). Everything else in the app stays fully offline.
Turning it on
Go to ⋮ (More) → Settings.
Under Auto-classification, choose Cloud + on-device. The first time, a Turn on cloud AI? dialog explains what's sent; tap I'm 18+ — enable.
If you don't have a key yet, the Set up Claude AI in 3 steps sheet opens automatically:
Open the Anthropic Console and create a free account.
Add a little billing credit (pay-as-you-go).
Create an API key (it starts with sk-ant-), copy it, and paste it into the field (or tap Paste from clipboard).
Tap Test & save. If the key works it's saved automatically (encrypted on your device) and shows "Key works ✓ — saved." Then tap Done.
Cloud AI only starts working once a valid key is saved. If you choose Cloud + on-device but close the key sheet without a working key, the app quietly keeps using on-device only — so finish the key setup to actually get Claude's suggestions.
How it helps: with cloud AI on, each new photo is sent automatically to suggest a place and tags. You'll see a Suggested location card on the editor — tap Use to apply it, pick an alternative chip, or Dismiss. Nothing is applied unless you tap it. On a saved spoon you can tap Re-classify with Claude to try again.
Related settings (all under Settings): the Confidence threshold slider decides when a guess is shown as confident vs. flagged for review; the Classification model picker (Cloud mode only) trades cost for accuracy (Haiku is fast & cheap and usually enough).
6. 3D: living sticker & spin
DKSpoonVault has two 3D effects, both controlled per-spoon on its detail screen. (A master 3D motion effects switch in Settings — and your phone's system "Remove animations" setting — can turn them all off.)
Living sticker (tilt)
Makes a flat spoon photo subtly tilt in 3D as you tilt your phone. On a spoon's detail screen tap Add 3D movement to turn it on (tap Remove 3D movement to turn it off). It's off until you enable it. This toggle appears only for an item that has a photo and no 3D spin — a spin replaces the flat image, so once you build one the tilt toggle is hidden.
3D spin (swipe to rotate)
Turns several angle photos of one spoon into a rotatable object you can swipe. There are two ways to build it, and they work a little differently:
From the Add flow (3D Spoon) — you review each angle: rotate it upright and drag a box around the spoon, then tap Next (or Done on the last angle). Use Skip to drop an angle. Angles become spin frames in the order you review them, and when you finish it opens straight to the finished spinning item.
From a spoon's detail screen (Add 3D spin (pick a few angles)) — you just pick a few gallery photos and the app builds the spin automatically (no per-angle review; it cuts each one out for you). A brief "3D spin ready" message pops up when it's done.
Either way, use at least 2 angle photos (up to 12), and clearer photos from distinct angles spin best.
On the detail screen, the spin becomes the main image:
Drag left/right to rotate frame-by-frame; a quick flick keeps spinning with momentum.
Tap the round ▶ (play) button in the bottom-right corner for one full turn.
Use Update 3D spin to rebuild it from new photos, or Remove 3D spin to go back to the flat photo (you can always rebuild).
Symmetric vs. sculpted: flat rectangular tiles get the clean die-cut border in the spin too; sculpted shapes like a bowl are shown border-less so the outline doesn't shimmer as they turn.
7. Browsing your collection
The home screen shows every spoon as a card, automatically grouped by US state / country / "Unplaced" (with a count per group). From the top bar you can:
🔍 Search — type to filter live across titles, places, tags, notes, events, gifter, and where-bought.
Sort — Recent (last edited first), Title (A–Z), or Place (A–Z).
⋮ (More) → Map, Stats, or Settings.
Tap a card to open its detail screen. On detail you can swipe left/right through your whole collection (in the current sort/filter order), ★ favorite it, ✎ edit, or delete it.
Long-press a card to enter selection mode: tap more cards to select, use Select all, then the 🗑 (Delete) icon to remove several at once. This "select all → delete" is also how you clear everything.
Deleting is permanent — it removes the spoon and its photo, with no undo/trash. Every delete asks you to confirm first.
8. Map & Stats
⋮ → Map shows your spoons pinned on an OpenStreetMap world map. Spoons at the same place share one pin; tap a pin to see its place name, and if more than one spoon is there the title shows a count. A place needs coordinates to appear; with cloud AI on, the app looks those up automatically for you.
⋮ → Stats is a read-only summary: total items, US states (out of 50), countries, places, trips, and favorites; an acquired-date timeline line (e.g. "N added this year · collected …"); plus bar breakdowns by state, country, top tags, events, and trip.
9. Backup & Restore
Because everything is stored only on your phone, use Backup to keep a copy or move to a new device. In Settings → Backup & restore:
Back up — saves your whole collection (all items + photos) as one .zip file to wherever you choose (e.g. Google Drive).
Restore — pick a backup .zip, confirm, and the app rebuilds your collection from it and restarts.
Restore replaces everything currently on the device with the backup's contents and can't be undone. The backup holds your spoons and photos — but not your settings: after moving to a new phone you'll re-enter your API key and re-set your preferences (cloud AI on/off + the 18+ acceptance, confidence threshold, Claude model, and 3D motion effects all return to their defaults).
10. Settings reference
Reach Settings from the collection's ⋮ (More) menu.
Setting
What it does
Set up Claude AI / status
Enter, test, and save your own Anthropic API key (encrypted on-device). Shows Ready ✓ or Not set up.
Auto-classification
Cloud + on-device (best accuracy, uses your key, sends photos to Claude) or On-device only (fully offline, reads on-item text — the default).
Confidence threshold
30–95% slider. Below it, an AI guess is flagged for review instead of shown as confident. You always apply a guess yourself.
Classification model
Cloud mode only. Which Claude model identifies items — Haiku 4.5 (fast/cheap, default), Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.8, or Fable 5. Pricier tiers cost more per photo.
3D motion effects
Master switch for the living-sticker tilt and spin auto-spin. Turn off for still images. (Your phone's "Remove animations" setting also disables them.)
Back up / Restore
Export/import your whole collection as a .zip (see §9).
Send feedback
Opens your email app to dkspoonvault@gmail.com, adding your app version, device model, and Android version to the message body.
User guide
Opens this guide in your browser.
Open-source licenses
The licenses of the libraries the app uses.
11. Privacy & your data
Everything is stored only on your device — your catalog and photos never go to any server we run (we have none).
No account, no ads, no analytics or tracking.
Nothing leaves your device unless you turn on cloud AI. With it on, each item photo is sent to Anthropic (using your key) to suggest a place and tags, and the Map may look up place-name coordinates. With it off, no photo ever leaves.
Minimal permissions: the app doesn't request camera, photos, or location permission — it uses your phone's camera app and photo picker.
Leave a little background around the spoon in the cut-out box — if the spoon touches the box edges, the cut may fall back to a plain crop.
"Touch up edges" only works right after Remove background — do a fresh Remove background first if the button says it isn't available.
A spin needs at least 2 angles; each angle runs a full cut-out, so large picks take a moment. Clearer photos from distinct angles spin best.
Re-classify with Claude appears only on a saved spoon with cloud AI on — save first.
Nothing saves until you tap Save in the editor; leaving discards unsaved changes.
Back up before switching phones — Android's own backup is turned off for privacy, so the in-app Backup/Restore is the only way to move your collection.
Reopen this guide any time from the ⋮ (More) menu → Settings → User guide.