Feature request: camera pinch to zoom

[Jamesblah 0]

I often use Evernote at conferences and meetings and the lack of camera zoom is a real problem. If you sit too far back in a room, you can't use Evernote to snap a slide because of the lack of zoom. You have to exit, use the iOS camera, re-enter Evernote and paste it in (meanwhile your note has scrolled back up to the top, which is another issue). By the time you do this, the presenter has moved on.

Please put in a pinch to zoom feature in the in-built camera! There have been threads about this for years, so it's time something was done about it!

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Sure, I think Evernote would be wise to add this as an option for their camera, though with their smart document scanning system they've implemented I'm not sure it would work. Thats technical stuff only Evernote knows though, but one can speculate!

 

A bit of an aside, in zooming the way you do you are "digitally zooming". This is not too different from (in fact, its almost identical to) taking the picture without zoom then cropping it down and sizing it back up. Given this to be the case, you could snap the photos using Evernote's camera without zoom, then crop them down afterwards achieving, essentially, the same effect (and all of the glorious quality loss inherent in either workflow in the absence of optical zoom!). 

[Jamesblah 0]

Yes, I tried the crop function, but unfortunately it's not the same and doesn't work for slides. I know this because I'm currently sitting in a lecture theatre trying to take notes from lectures.

For a start, you can't tell there is significant camera shake until after you've taken the photo and cropped it(by which time the slides have changed).

Secondly, the other lacking feature is being able to change exposure. If you're taking a photo of a PowerPoint slide, you need to change the exposure level so it's visible as the brightness of the slide within a generally darkened room fools the camera meter. Zooming in digitally would hopefully at least cause the autoexposure to change, but it would be better to be able to also change it manually (like you can with the iOS camera app)

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Yes, I tried the crop function, but unfortunately it's not the same and doesn't work for slides.

For a start, you can't tell there is significant camera shake until after you've taken the photo and cropped it(by which time the slides have changed).

Secondly, the other lacking feature is being able to change exposure. If you're taking a photo of a PowerPoint slide, you need to change the exposure level so it's visible as the brightness of the slide within a generally darkened room fools the camera meter. Zooming in digitally would hopefully at least cause the autoexposure to change, but it would be better to be able to also change it manually (like you can with the iOS camera app)

Those are definitely two significant shortcomings of the built-in Evernote Camera if you are looking to use it as if it were a traditional camera. Unfortunately I don't think this is how Evernote is expecting it to be used, I think they are expecting it to be used primarily as if it were a scanner, which requires much different controls (and far fewer manual controls!). 

 

I suspect your best bet is to use the iOS camera, then import all the images in bulk to Evernote afterwards. Since iOS stores your photos chronologically then it should be fairly easy to maintain order. Not an ideal workaround at all, but workarounds rarely are ideal otherwise they wouldn't be workarounds!

[Jamesblah 0]

Yes, that's what I'm currently doing, but it's frustrating, which is why I posted.

For a program called 'Evernote', I don't think it's unreasonable to be able to take notes with it, and one of the commonest places to need to take notes would be a lecture theatre with projected slides...

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Certainly seems like a reasonable use case to me!

[saxe17 0]

Scott,

I'm at a conference snapping photos of PPT from back of room, then cropping like you suggested. It's an extra step but working great.   Thanks for the tip.

Saxe

[DaneGolden 0]

I could also use this feature big time. My makeshift solution at a conference is to take photos with the iphone and at the end of the week when I get time, sync them with the different sessions. It takes a lot of extra organizational time. The crop is too much of a pain on the fly and the photos are poor quality.

[bndouglas 2]

Hi, 

When I Google'd for this issue it was interesting that the first hit was to this thread, and it's exactly the same use case as for me. 

I work in the IT industry, and I go to lots of industry specific meet ups. The are a huge number of people (like me) taking photos of the slides (and I'm sure a large proportion of those use Evernote). Right now the best bet is to sit as close to the front as possible, because cropping the slides afterwards is too time consuming. 

With my new iPhone 7 plus there's another reason why I'd prefer not to crop the slides - you now get 2x optical zoom, so zooming before taking the photo would be a huge advantage on that front too. 

This has been a pain point for me for some time now. I'd really appreciate it if Evernote would consider adding zoom to the camera feature (even if it means switching to a mode where I loose some of the optical recognition stuff). 

Thanks in advance,

Brian

[CarlosGs 0]

What's interesting about this, is the fact that the pinch to zoom feature works on Android, as well as exposure controls. Looks like enough reason to move to a different OS!!

[Klaus 4]

Same situation here: Trying to use evernote to take notes about a physics conference. Pinch to zoom would also allow automatic brightness adjustment and border-recognition to work better (seen when using camera scannner apps, after being fed up with the additional steps needed in evernote).

Rule of thumb for me with notes: If I can't do it live during the talk, I won't do it at all (see e.g. the idea of taking photos in bulk and adding them later), let alone that the slide-photos normally require some annotation, which needs to be done inside evernote, while I still remember the context.

Currently, taking a photo and then cropping it as "document" sort of works, but it takes significantly too long for live note-taking.