iPhone Camera Roll Photos of Text/Book Pages Uploading

[marymac 0]

Instead of using the best workflow app for uploading text to Evernote (Premium), being in a hurry I used my iPhone camera to capture pages from book, and NOW I am trying to figure out the quickest way to get my text (pages from book/research) uploaded to Evernote?? I) Email each page to my Evernote email account, 2) Create new Evernote note and use camera feature within note to upload text to new note...OR....???

 

I am also wondering which method allows OCR to be done on text uploading? Will a photo of text be treated as a image or will it be processed as text via Evernote Premium OCR upload process?

 

Also, WHICH apps are best for taking photos of text from a book to upload into our research notebooks? Scanning apps that OCR before uploading to Evernote??

 

 

I need quick fix to get this project material uploaded to my Evernote Research Notebook. And also to retrieve the other mounds of research I did using my iPhone camera app, photos of book pages I need to also upload to Evernote to include in my other research notebooks. I am definitely trying to establish a much better workflow for uploading research camera text photos into Evernote. 

 

Greatly appreciate the help on this!!

[s2sailor 2,186]

I think the simplest way is to just open Evernote on your iPhone and then select photos.  From there you can easily select all the photos at once to put into one note or do it one at a time to put one photo into one note.  Once the photo is in Evernote, regardless of the method used, the photo will get OCR'd once it has been sync'd to their servers, that is where it takes place. 

 

Concerning the OCR question, there is a lot of good information on the forum.  Here is one link you can start with and go from there.

 

There are a lot of suggestions for book scanning in the forum as well.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@marymac:

 

The quickest way to get your photos of your book into Evernote may not be the best overall.

 

The best, overall method, IMO, is to convert the photo images of your book into a searchable PDF, meaning that the images would be OCR'd to produce text.  There are probably a number of iPhone/iPad apps that can do this, but since I have not actually done this on the iPhone (done many times on Mac) I don't have any iPhone App recommendations.  Please see this review:  The Best Image-to-Text App for iPhone.  It is a little old (2011), so you might do some Google searches to find other choices.

 

If you have an easy way to get your Camera Roll images to a Mac or PC, then there will be lots of better choices.  I use Adobe Acrobat Pro X on the Mac, and I can easily create a PDF from images, and then OCR (Recognize Text) the images.

 

So, in summary, the BEST approach is:

1. Create PDFs from your Camera Roll images
   • I recommend creating multiple small PDFs rather than one large PDF
   • Provides faster processing, and gives you more options for storage (like putting in separate EN Notes)
   • Large PDFs created from scanning (photos) can be problematic in Evernote
   • So, maybe one chapter per PDF
2. OCR the PDFs
3. Optimize the PDF to reduce the size of the underlying image
4. Import into Evernote.

The quick approach is:

1. Goto EN iPhone Settings > General > Camera,
   1. Set the image size as small as you find acceptable.  
   2. I'd start with "Small", and do a test.  
   3. This sets the image size when you use the EN Camera, or import from Camera roll.
2. Create a Note in EN iPhone
3. Attach one or more images from your Camera Roll
4. Repeat Steps #2 and #3 as needed
5. Here again, I would tend towards the small size, with multiple Notes

In both approaches I'd highly recommend that you start slow, and run a few, small test cases to make sure things work as you expect.

 

EDIT:

 

I just ran across this iPhone app.  The free ver looks pretty good, but you may want the features of the paid ver.

Doc Scan - Scanner to Scan PDF, Print, Fax, Email, and Upload to Cloud Storages by IFUNPLAY CO., LTD.
https://appsto.re/us/ehqbB.i

 

If you just want to search in Evernote, then you don't need to OCR before you attach the PDF to a EN Note.

Once the PDF is in Evernote, you can always open in EN Win or EN Mac and using a 3rd party tool do the OCR there.

[marymac 0]

Appreciate greatly the feedback! 

Problem I am having in establishing best workflow to get my photos (in my camera roll) of pages from books (research) into Evernote the least painfully is my routes to do so are compromised/even downright blocked. My computer is too full, waiting for relief via my moving my photo library to exterior harddrive etc. ALL on the to-do list of trying to get too... I GNASH my teeth as bringing my text photos into my bulging computer is not possible at this time, but definitely warrants another look down the road as a better workflow possibility after I address the computer clogs. TY for future insight!

 

I did try opening Evernote on my iPad and bringing in text photos in new note. It is readable pages but surprising in I wasn't expecting to see photos as they are in camera roll, was expecting to see text only versions. Thus I am now thinking I best edit the photos of text BEFORE I import them into Evernote?? I was hoping to skip that step:)

 

I am also thinking most likely I am making the notes far too large as I am including 10 - 15 pages of photos of book pages in a note, largely to keep subjects grouped by book source I am using in my research. Is there a way to see how large the notes are after importing?? Selecting the photos within Evernote app is a process I am doing one photo at a time, surprisingly I did not see a way to select a range of photos. Is there a way to select a range within the Evernote app??

 

Also, while I am asking for help now in importing text photos into Evernote under my current inefficient workflow, I greatly appreciated links you provided above to help me establish better workflow in the future (reading the link info!). I greatly believe I need to make this upload process more manageable. I am fighting OVERWHELM from too much data clogging too many devices...with the goal of utilizing my Evernote Premium account for much needed relief! Thanks for the help! 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@marymac:

 

It really wouldn't be that hard, and not much additional work, to use one of the Image-to-PDF apps to create a PDF from your Camera Roll, and then import that PDF into Evernote.

 

I guess it all depends on how many pages/images you have stored in the Camera Roll.  The more images you have the more I would lean to creating a PDF first.  It is likely the image-to-pdf apps will provide some amount of compression of the image, where as straight import of images into Evernote will not.