Well, the delayed tax season is upon us and a few folks are scrambling to get “stuff” prepared at the last second. These modern days there are so many more ways of capturing information than were even dreamt of 20 years ago; but, this has led to some interesting confusion. One individual hit me with “I have photographed all my receipts this year; but, how do I get them out of my phone?”. Yet another mentioned having moved to Windows 10 and now their old scanner doesn’t work and so forth.
So, it seemed to me that the same solution applied to both of these situations. Images taken with a phone are no different than those scanned with a flatbed or any other type of scanner. Yes, a flatbed scanner is quite convenient for pressing curled receipts flat and scanning them into the computer; but, the real purpose is often just to “capture” a number and have proof of the associated expenditure, asset, or whatever so perhaps a quick photo of that document or item is all you really needed.
But, wait you say, how do I get those pictures out of my phone, and then how do I get them into some form that is useful? For me, the first step is to get them transferred to a computer (yes, I know how powerful modern phones are; but, I am experienced in solutions using Windows and associated utilities).
My second choice for getting photos off of a phone and into a computer is to sync the phone with a cloud service (iCloud, google-cloud, and so forth) then follow the instructions to log your computer into that same cloud account and you can sync again or copy and paste from the cloud to your pc. This has the advantage that the cloud services are really good at converting names and formatting issues automatically so what you get on your computer is readily useable when it arrives. At this point, you could print them out (ugh!) archive them onto a portable memory device, burn them onto a CD or DVD, or whatever seems most functional for you.
However, some folks like to have all this information in a more standard form like JPG’s or even PDFs (Adobe format). How do I get all of this stuff into the right format, you know, so I can use it? Well, when it comes from the cloud it is extremely likely to come as a JPG which is a nice compressed format suitable for viewing. If, instead, you want PDF, you might have to print all of those photos to a PDF printer (Windows 10 has one built-in, or you can download one of several from the internet at no charge – “cute pdf” has worked well for me in the past). Oh, and you can select multiple photos and have them all printed to pdf files in a single step if you have a lot of them to convert.
For those who still aren’t happy with all these photos of information or pdf’s of information, there is a technique called OCR (optical character recognition) which can convert all of this into numbers that can be used in a spreadsheet or in a myriad of other ways. For this, I usually suggest looking on the internet for a utility program to do this partially automatically and suggest spending a few dollars to get one that reviewers have had success with; or, you could simply type the numbers into whatever application you favor and be just as well off (most spreadsheets allow you to import jpg’s and pdfs so you have the source material and the numbers together).