Organising photos of documents: scans, whiteboards and business cards

At some point most people stop scanning and start photographing. It is faster, the phone is already in your hand, and the quality is good enough for anything that is not a legal filing.

So the paper problem gets solved and a new one appears: a camera roll with four hundred photographs of documents in it, mixed in with everything else, and no way to tell them apart without looking.

Why these are harder than normal photos

A photo of a beach is findable because photo apps are good at places, dates and faces. A photo of a gas bill defeats all three. It was taken at your kitchen table on a Tuesday and contains no faces, so every tool your phone offers for organising photos is useless on exactly the photos you most need to find again.

The content is all text, and the text is in a picture, which means it is invisible to search unless something reads it.

Get them out of the camera roll

This is the step that does most of the work, and it is worth doing even if you do nothing else.

Photographs of documents are not photographs in the way holiday pictures are. They are documents that happen to be stored as images, and they belong wherever your other documents are. Leaving them in the camera roll means they are sorted by date alongside pictures of your lunch, forever.

Reading beats sorting

Once they are somewhere sensible, the question is whether anything has read them.

In Stash every image gets read on the way in. What comes back is a transcription of the text visible in it, plus a short name describing what it shows. That combination is what makes a photographed document behave like a document: the text is searchable, and the name in a list tells you what it is.

A photo of a business card becomes the person and the company. A photo of a whiteboard becomes something about what was on it. A gas bill becomes the supplier and the month.

Then it gets filed by what it is, so bills go where bills go and the whiteboard goes with work, without you tagging anything.

Three specific cases

Business cards. Photograph them and let the text be read, then throw the card away. The failure mode here is keeping cards in a drawer in case you need them, which means you will not find the one you need.

Whiteboards. Take the photo straight on, with the room lights on rather than the flash, and crop out the wall. Handwriting recognition is much better than it was but it is still handwriting, so give it the best chance you can. Anything genuinely important, retype in a note within a day, while you still remember what the arrows meant.

Multi page documents. Photograph every page, and if it matters, photograph them in one go so the timestamps are adjacent. There is no clever fix for page ordering in a camera roll, so the shortcut is making sure the pages arrive together.

When to actually scan

A photo is fine for keeping a record. Use a real scan, or a scanning app that flattens and deskews, when the document is going to someone else, when it needs to be legible for a long time, or when it is legal or financial and the quality of the copy might be questioned.

For everything else, the photo you took in four seconds is worth more than the perfect scan you keep meaning to do.

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