161 water-damaged books turned into an insurance-ready inventory with AI
A custom GPT and a calm assembly-line workflow turned 161 water-damaged books into a complete, insurance-ready spreadsheet.
Faced with a pile of water-damaged books and an insurance claim to prepare, this student did not freeze. They designed a custom GPT, planned a gentle step-by-step workflow, and documented all 161 books. It is a quiet, practical story about using AI to turn overwhelm into something you can finish.
Before
Water had damaged a large collection of books, many of them music scores, biographies and titles in several languages. Every one needed to be identified, priced and recorded for an insurance claim. Done by hand, it was the kind of task that feels too big and too stressful to even begin.
“Planned the workflow with ChatGPT first (“assembly line” approach: one book → 2 photos → next book) to minimize stress and friction”
In their own words
The turning point
In the program they learned to plan with AI before acting. They mapped out the job with ChatGPT first, settling on an assembly line: one book, two photos, next book. Then they built a custom GPT with extraction rules written together, so each batch of photos came back as clean rows ready for the spreadsheet.
After
They photographed every book's cover and spine, worked in batches of about five books, and pasted the results into a master sheet. A one-command Terminal script resized the images into a separate folder so the originals stayed safe. Several research passes filled in ISBNs and replacement costs, with unresolved items flagged and cleaned up at the end.
What it lets people do
The workflow lets anyone facing a damaged collection turn photos into a structured, traceable inventory without typing each entry by hand. The custom GPT pulls titles, authors, languages and publishers straight from images, ready for a spreadsheet.
What they learned
They saw that AI can reduce overwhelm by breaking a stressful task into small, repeatable steps. Simple automation removed the biggest bottleneck, and working in iterative passes with versioned files made the result more accurate and easier to trace.
“AI can reduce overwhelm by turning a stressful task into small, repeatable steps”
In their own words
See the work
Damaged Books: AI-assisted insurance inventory was built during AI Mastery.
Read the full submission
Written 15 February 2026 Submitted by the storyteller
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