Write it down
Photos
A thing can carry photos, and Twos can read the text inside them and recognize what they show.
Why you'd care
Photographing something is the fastest capture there is. A whiteboard, a receipt, a page of a book, a label on the back of a bottle. Because what is in the photo is searchable, it is also a real filing strategy rather than a dead end.
The 60-second version
Add a photo from the capture bar or the edit bar. It attaches to the thing, which keeps whatever text it already had.
In the phone app this works offline too. The photo is saved on your device and uploads on its own once you are back online.
Step by step
Several photos on one thing
A thing can hold more than one. They stay together as a group, which is what you want for a set of pages or a few angles of the same object.
Cropping
Photos can be cropped when added. GIFs skip cropping, since cropping them would break the animation.
Searching what is in them
Twos reads the text in your photos so search can find it later. That is what makes photographing a receipt useful six months on.
A photo does not need any text to be found. Twos also notes what it shows, so a search for "dog" or "beach" brings back the photos of your dog or that day at the beach, even if you never typed a word next to them. It describes what is there, never who: people are not identified by name.
See reading text in your photos.
Going further
Photograph rather than transcribe. For anything you only need to find again, a photo is faster and loses less than typing a summary.
Add a word of context. Twos already knows a photo shows a dog, but not that it is your sister's dog. One typed word for what only you know makes it far easier to find.
Capture with no signal. On a plane or underground, take the photo anyway. It stays on the thing and uploads when you reconnect.
Settings that change this
- Settings Lists & things Default photo size sets how photos are displayed by default.
- Settings Smart features Search text in photos controls whether text is read from your photos.
Tips
- Photograph the thing, not a note about the thing.
- Book pages, wine labels and business cards are the highest-value photos to capture, because the text does all the work later.
- Search for what is in a photo, not just what is written on it. "Whiteboard", "receipt" and "sunset" all work.
If it's not working
The photo will not upload. Usually a weak connection or none. It keeps the photo on your device and retries on its own, and the thing is already saved with its text either way.
Search cannot find text I can clearly see, or a photo by what is in it. Photo reading may be off, the photo may still be waiting to upload, or the scan has not run yet on older photos. See reading text in your photos.