Phone camera stand – going paperless

 
Recently I’ve read a couple of articles on ditching the filing by using evernote to take pictures of important documents and just shredding the originals. Or at least be less worried about how they’re stored since you can always search for and recover the digital version.

This idea really appeals to me since I am terrible at doing filing, I normally just leave things in random piles around the house. But the promise of having one simple step to go through before that which suddenly means I can easily find any letter I’ve been sent, led me to this weeks project.

So this amazing capability comes courtesy of Evernote and it’s ability to create a note from a picture. Evernote automatically OCRs the pictures you send, and then text searches work on the contents of the pictures. It even shows a yellow highlight over the word in the image that matches your search. But the thing about OCR is that it is only as good as the source image allows.

I could have bought a proper scanner, but I really wanted to be able to do everything on phone, right from inside evernote. This means using my phones camera. Try as I might, I find it hard to get a good clean steady image holding my phone above an a4 sheet of paper. It can be done, it’s just often takes more than one attempt.

So I hit upon the idea of making a simple frame that would hold my phone horizontal above a surface large enough for an a4 letter. I had some ideas about making the frame include the flat

It really isn’t anything more than a few lengths of wood to form a frame, and a crudely carved out block to fit the size of my phone, and a hole where the camera rests. surface, but ultimately went for just a stand that would go on the desk/table.

Obviously the picture doesn’t show the phone in place, because I could’t be bothered to find another camera to use.

So far Evernote does a great job of ocr-ing the images I’ve taken using the stand. So now I just need to make sure I get properly into this habbit.