Light first

Turn off the flash, look for the window, avoid your own hand’s shadow. An under-exposed but even page reads better than a bright one crossed by a shadow.

Flat, straight on

The reading direction doesn’t matter — the tool straightens it — but a page photographed at an angle loses its margins. Hold the camera directly above, not at a slant.

The whole page, margins included

Folios, stamps and shelfmarks sit in the margins. Frame wide: the tool finds the text, it doesn’t recover what’s out of shot.

A double-page spread, one shot

An open book is photographed in a single shot, and read as one page. That’s half the photos, and a single page to count.

Don’t rename anything

The order the shots were taken in is the order of the box; the name the camera gives keeps it. One folder per shelfmark or per day is enough — the tool goes through subfolders.

Don’t retouch anything

No cropping, no rotating in an editor: every save recompresses the JPEG and slightly damages the text. Deposit the original as it is, the tool takes care of the rest and keeps it intact.

See it on your own pages

A hundred pages transcribed and translated, for a year, no card required.

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Photographing your archives well