How to digitize handwritten notes, with Filmina and without it

If you're wondering how to digitize handwritten notes, here's the short answer: take a sharp photo of each page, run it through a tool that reads handwriting, fix what it got wrong while looking at the photo, and keep the result next to the lecture slides from that class. The point isn't having your notes on a laptop. It's being able to search them, add to them and study from them without copying everything out again by hand.

Paper has its perks: plenty of us think better with a pen, and in some lecture halls a laptop is distracting or not allowed. The trouble comes later. The notebook stays in your backpack, loose pages go missing, and in finals week you've got the slides on your phone and three notebooks you can't search. Notes on paper are just as good, but harder to find.

In this post I'll walk through how to do it with tools you already have and how it works in Filmina, step by step, using one example lecture from Intro to Sociology: the one on Durkheim and social facts, with three notebook pages scribbled down while the professor talked.

Before you take the photo

Half the mistakes in handwriting-to-text come from the photo, not the tool. Five things worth getting right:

1. Even light. A window or the ceiling light beats the flash, which leaves a white glare in the middle of the page.
2. Flat and straight. Put the notebook on the desk, press down the fold with your hand and shoot from straight above, not at an angle.
3. One page per photo. Two pages in one shot read worse, and later it's hard to tell which comes first.
4. Get the margins in. The arrows and side notes you scribbled are sometimes the best part of the lecture. Keep them in frame.
5. Date and course at the top. If you still can, write them on each page before the photo. Without them, a month from now you won't know which lecture each page belongs to.

How to do it without a special app

There are three ways with what you already have, and each is good for something different.

Rewrite it by hand. The slowest option, but done right it's also studying. The trick is not to copy: close the notebook, write what you remember from the lecture, and only then open it to fill in the gaps. That effort of recalling sticks better than rereading. The problem is time: with five classes, you can't do it for every lecture.

A tool that reads text from a photo. Google Drive, for example, turns a PDF or image into a text document when you open it with Google Docs. It works, but it's built for printed text: with rushed handwriting it makes more mistakes, loses lists and arrows, and leaves the text in a separate file, far from that lecture's slides.

Keep only the photos. Fastest of all, and for some things it's enough (a graph, a table you copied off the whiteboard). But you can't search a photo: if you don't remember which page has the bit on mechanical solidarity, you'll be flipping through all of them.

How it works in Filmina, step by step

In Filmina, a web app that explains your lecture slides out loud, every course has a notebook with all your notes, and photos of your paper notes go there. Here's how I'd do it with the Durkheim lecture:

1. Open the course notebook. It's the first thing in Materials. The + above the index opens a new page; so does New note, under Add. Give it the lecture's title.
2. Add the photo. An empty note shows three colored shortcuts at the bottom: Draw, Image and Dictate. Tap Image, or paste the photo, or drop it on the note. It's also in the menu you get by typing / at the start of a line.
3. Choose Extract the text. Before placing it, Filmina asks what to do with it. Extract the text reads what's written in the photo, handwriting included, and drops it into the note as text, in a box with the photo on top ("Read from this image"). If you'd rather keep it as a picture, choose Paste the image, and you can pull the text out later with the same button.
4. Fix it against the photo. Since the photo sits right above the text, you compare line by line. Where it read "social fects" instead of "social facts", you fix it right there.
5. Repeat for the other pages. If you have a batch of photos, upload them to the space with Upload a file or Take a photo: they don't go to Materials, they become a new notebook page, one under the other.

What it reads becomes plain text, so you can organize it with the usual blocks: headings, lists, to-dos, toggles. The text from the photo is a draft, not your final notes, and the pass you make fixing it is already a first review of the lecture. The details are all in The notebook.

What's missing: dictate it or draw it

When you clean up your notes, something you didn't write always turns up. The example the professor gave that you remember, but that's a single word and a question mark in the notebook. That's what Dictate is for: you talk, and what you say lands on the line you're on. While it listens, a pill floats on that line with Done to finish. Each dictation stops on its own after four minutes, and the audio isn't kept, only the text.

And some things aren't text: a diagram with arrows, a table you copied from the board. If the photo isn't enough, you can redo it with the Draw block, using a stylus, your finger or the mouse. Drawings don't feed into the explanation on their own; if you want Mina to look at one, circle it with the lasso and ask, say, "turn this into text".

If you'd rather have the lecture transcribed while you take notes instead of writing on paper, that's Record class, and I covered it in how to transcribe a lecture live.

Getting your notes into the explanation

This is the difference from storing the text anywhere else. A notebook page can be tied to that lecture's files: under the title, + File adds the Durkheim slide deck. From then on, Mina takes your notes into account when explaining those slides. What your note adds (the professor's example about social norms in a grocery store line, say), Mina tells you; what only underlines something already on the slide gets more weight.

The chat works the same way: when an answer comes from your notes, it says so at the top, "From your notes". For Mina, the text is what counts, not the photo: an unread photo is just a photo. That's why it's worth extracting the text even when the photo looks fine. In how to chat with your notes I went through how to get the most out of that, and in how Filmina works, the full path through a course.

What to know before you use it

Straight up:

• It needs a connection and an account. It runs in the browser. If the internet drops while you type, the note is saved on your device and uploads on its own when you're back online.
• The reading can get things wrong. With very rushed handwriting, your own abbreviations or a crooked photo, something will come out wrong. That's why the photo stays above the text.
• There are limits. It takes JPG, PNG, HEIC (the iPhone's format), WebP and TIFF photos up to 20 MB each, and reads up to a hundred a day; past that, the photo stays as an image and you can extract the text the next day. Dictation uses the same hours as Record class, and the free plan only gets a few a month. The details are on the plans.
• Comments are for you. Mina doesn't read them; it reads the note's text.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert handwritten notes to text?

Take a sharp, straight photo of each page and run it through a tool that reads handwriting. Then fix what it read while looking at the photo, because rushed handwriting always brings some mistakes.

What app converts handwriting to text?

Several apps can read text from a photo, like Google Drive when you open the image with Google Docs, though it's mainly built for printed text. In Filmina, the notebook's Extract the text option also reads handwriting and keeps the photo above the text so you can correct it.

Is it worth rewriting your notes?

If you do it from memory and then fill in the gaps from the notebook, yes: it's a way of studying. Copying word for word takes a long time and does little; for that, it's better to turn the photo into text and spend the time reviewing.

How do I digitize a whole notebook?

One photo per page, with good light and the date and course written at the top. Sort them by lecture and convert one lecture at a time, so each set of notes ends up next to the slides it belongs to.