Every day I come across text pages that I want to share out with folks. Even more often is our hard work on Whiteboards. There are several options to use your iPhone camera to take a picture, clean up and share out. I have bought them and wrote my thoughts here. Some have powerful alignment and image adjustment controls. Most end up creating a white background with rough text… enough for folks to get the idea of what you where sharing.
A pleasant surprise was finding the free app, Genius Scan. No excessive frills here… it does the basics and it does those very well.
This is an a screenshot of an actual document I was taking while at the accountant’s office.
The app attempts at finding the text area and recognize if the pages needs a bit of a twist to straighten the text. You can grab the corners and move/resize the box to best match what you where hoping to share.
You can choose how Genius Scan ‘sees’ the document so it has a better chance at giving you the results you want.
Below is the result from the image, alignment and auto clean up. The app runs rather quickly compared to most of the other options. Don’t like what you see, hit the ‘Back’ button and take another run at it…
Tapping the ‘share’ button allows you to save the image off to your ‘Camera Roll’ to treat as you would any other photograph. Or, you can insert the image in a new or document in progress. And of course, used a lot by me, share out via email.
This is an actual output from Genius Scan. There is no OCR engine built in, but you can use other apps that specialize in that. In my case, I’m interested in sharing what I saw as it was originally, not as editable text. Whiteboard successes for me has similar nice results.
A quick snap from a magazine… color and B&W chosen via ‘enhancement’ after the image was already aligned.