If you’re trying to be paperless, one of the biggest challenges will be to digitize the paper that people keep sending you all the time. I’ve found that the built-in webcam on most laptops is good enough to take basic images of the letters and papers I receive. Evernote It makes it easy to record directly to your laptops with a built-in webcam capture.
There is browsers this provides a higher quality capture, but for small notes and items to remember briefly, the webcam is good enough and always with you. You can also use the built-in camera on your various mobile devices to take similar shots, but I found the webcam setting to be a useful addition to my paper capture.
How to take a Webcam Note in Evernote?
To take a Webcam note, open Evernote for PC or Mac and click the little arrow next to it and select . Alternatively, you can press Ctrl + Shift + W to start a new webcam note.
You will see a pop-up window showing what your webcam is seeing. Place your paper or business card in front of it and click Take Snapshot. You can retake your note or save it to Evernote.
If you take a clear enough image, Evernote can OCR your image and make the text searchable. This doesn’t always work for webcam shots as angle or quality can be an issue, so I suggest adding a few keywords to the title. However, I’ve had quite a bit of luck even on a crumpled and angled note.
The OCR process is pretty fast for premium users, but free users may see a delay in OCR or image processing. To check and see if an image has been OCRed, look at the small magnifying glass at the top right. If it is gray, the image has been OCR processed, if it is colored, OCR has been performed.
While we love the snapshot feature, we wish we could add a quick webcam video and voice memo to Evernote with the webcam functionality. There are times when it’s easier to save an idea and then write it down. You can use a tool like Dial2Do To get this feature, however, it would be nice to be able to save a video note within Evernote.
