Photographing books yourself

Many archives, reading rooms and special collections do not allow scanners, but they do allow phones. That is enough: a present-day phone takes pictures from which text recognition gets good results – provided a few things are right when you take them. Whatever goes wrong while photographing has to be repaired later. A good picture saves all the after-work.

The most important point: one page at a time

Photograph the left page first, then the right one, each on its own. That is twice as many pictures, but afterwards there is nothing to split, and every page fills the picture. This is the single most important advice.

If you did end up with double pages, that is no disaster: Prepare scans splits them – see Reading in a PDF or images.

Camera and book

• Hold the camera parallel to the page, not at an angle from above. The easiest way: hold the phone over the page and tilt it until the edges of the page run parallel to the edges of the picture.
• Keep the book as flat as possible. Follow the rules of the reading room (book cushions, wedges, weights) and never force an old book flat. Where a page will not stay down, hold it with a finger at the outer edge – it does not get in the way of the text there, and Prepare scans paints it over in white (tick box Remove dark margins and fingers).
• Portrait orientation, and hold the phone steady. Tap the middle of the page to focus.

The page fills the picture

Text recognition needs about 300 pixels per inch. Rule of thumb: a book page 15 cm (6 in) wide needs about 1800 pixels across. Any present-day phone manages that easily if the page fills the picture – but not if it sits small in the middle with half the table around it. So go close, until only a narrow margin is left around the page. Do not zoom in with your fingers: that only enlarges the picture, not the sharpness – move the phone closer instead.

Small print, footnotes and Fraktur are grateful if you go a little closer still.

Light

• Even – the whole page equally bright, no bright half and no dark half.
• No flash. It reflects off smooth paper and is forbidden in many reading rooms anyway.
• Not in your own shadow. Leaning over the book often casts a shadow on the page. Stand so that the light comes from the side or from the front.
• Light by a window is usually best – but without direct sunlight, which casts hard shadows.

Order, file format and file names

• All pages of one book in one folder, and nothing else in it.
• The file names must sort in page order. The phone numbers them consecutively by itself (IMG_0001.jpg, IMG_0002.jpg …); if you photograph in order, that works out. If you took a page twice, delete the worse picture before reading them in – otherwise the page appears twice in the book.
• iPhone: photos as JPEG. The iPhone usually saves photos in the HEIC format, which Fraktur-Korrektor cannot read. So switch before photographing: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. Photos already taken are converted to JPEG by the iPhone itself when you transfer them to a Mac or PC by cable, as long as Settings → Apps → Photos has Automatic (not Keep Originals) selected at the very bottom. Android phones save JPEG anyway.

To read them in: in the library click Open … → Choose folder … and point to the folder. The program reads the images in the order of their names – from there on it works as described in Reading in a PDF or images.

Try a sample first

Before you photograph 300 pages in the reading room: take two or three pages, read them in and look at the traffic light. If it is green, carry on as you are. If it is yellow or red, it is almost always one of the points above – usually the page is too small in the picture, crooked or blurred. That can still be changed now; after your visit to the archive it cannot.

If they are double pages after all

• Prepare scans (built in, one click) splits double pages, straightens crooked pages and removes dark edges and fingers at the margin: Reading in a PDF or images.
• ScanTailor also helps with pages that curve towards the spine, with stains and uneven light – a separate program with more manual work: Installing the tools.

Book-scanning apps

There are phone apps that split double pages, flatten the curve towards the spine and retouch fingers while you take the picture – for instance vFlat Scan (Android and iPhone). Free to try; for whole books you need a subscription, in the App Store in September 2026 about 4 to 5 US dollars a month or 36 to 40 a year. The pictures from such an app can be read in like any other PDF or folder of images.

Bear in mind: the photos pass through another company's app, and whether they leave your phone in the process is not disclosed by the maker. For archival material you may only photograph under conditions, ask beforehand if in doubt. Fraktur-Korrektor itself sends nothing to the internet.