How to use your autofocus mobile cam as a scanner / photocopier / brain
Steve Litchfield from AllAboutSymbian.com posted an excellent little
piece about how you can put your beloved little gadget to use for just
one more thing. Here ist the original article, which I highly
recommend if you have an autofocusing cam in your phone:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/How_to_Use_your_phone_as_a_Scanner.php
I wanted to elaborate on a couple more things as this is something
which I have been doing for over a year now, and maybe some of you can
make use of the bits of knowledge I picked up along the road!
Why look for the cable when you can e-mail your "scans"?
Steve recommended hooking up your phone to your PC after you took the
pictures. As I never seem to have my PC connection cable handy when I
need it, I am taking a different approach. Because I have my E71
connected to my WiFi at home anyway, I usually just e-mail my "scans"
to my Gmail account. It's usually faster than hooking up the phone,
and as an extra bonus I get to keep the pictures in my Gmail archive
if I want.
Increase your printout quality with smart resampling!
I also find that when printing out copies of them, it usually pays off
to "upsample" them before they get sent to your printer. To do this, I
usually resize the pictures with my photo processing software so that
my printer will not have to do the resizing necessary to bring the
photo to its native 300dpi resolution. The photo sofware (I use
IrfanView for such simple tasks, it's just super fast to open and do
the stuff with) does a MUCH better job of making the picture 300dpi
than your printer does, due to the better algorithms implemented.
(Just be sure to do "high quality resampling" with the s/w you use).
If your software doesn't offer natively to calculate the necessary new
300dpi pixel size for your image, it might be worth to calculate it
yourself: Take the width of the printout (page width minus page
margins) and multiply it with 300. That's the width your resized
snapshot should have. You need to do this only once for the paper size
in your part of the world of course and can resize all the graphics
you will ever want to print out to that width.
Also, if you just want to do a very rough snapshot that you will not
want to take the extra processing step later on, you might want to
take a snapshot in black/white right away and set the exposure to
produce a slightly darker picture. If your phone offers it, save those
settings as "photocopy" or something that you find meaningful!
Get an external brain!
One last thing, and for me the absolutely most used of them all, is to
use the snapshots to (over time) form a huge external brain holding
all the bits and pieces you might ever want to remember. I use a piece
of software for that which I can hardly imagine living without
anymore. It's called EVERNOTE, and it's free for basic usage. For
heavy users like me (I have approximately 5000 notes in my accounts!),
it costs around 50$ per year. For my personal usage, I consider that
an absolute bargain, but YMMV.
What Evernote does, is that you get a private E-Mail address that you
can mail anything to (not only snapshots, but also text, or webclips
or whatever, just take a look at their website for a demo video) and
that gets then put into your account. Once your observations are in
there, you can tag them, put them in folders or e-mail them to others.
But the niftiest part is that Evernote will automatically run an OCR
over your pictures that will find almost any form of text in your
images, even if it is handwriting, and index it for you. It works a
lot "better" than any other OCR because (afaik) it does not store only
the "one correct word" for every piece of writing it finds but will
occasionally opt to store multiple candidates for what it thinks the
letters it found might mean.
What that means for you is that you will be able to find (via a
google-esque search bar in the Evernote web- or desktop app)
pracatically ANY word in your pictures, even if it showed up out of
focus, upside down, or in any other hard-to-read way.
I take snapshots of shop's business hours, products I want to
remember, business cards, CD covers and stuff like that all the time
and then instantly forget them because I know Evernote can "recall"
them for me. It really helps to protect my brain from the common
information overload that is so easy to get yourself into these days.
Have fun and let me know in the comments if you find any of these tips
userful, or have some of your own to add!
