ELLAPhotos of pages
A phone photo of a page is often the quickest way to get a printed sheet into ELLA. ELLA accepts PNG, JPEG, TIFF, HEIC and HEIF images.
Take a good photo
- Put the page flat on a plain, dark or light table. Use a flat surface, not your lap.
- Use even light. Daylight from a window works well. Avoid your own shadow on the page.
- Hold the phone directly above the page, so the page looks like a rectangle, not a trapezium.
- Fit the whole page in the frame, with a small margin.
- Tap to focus, then take the photo. Check that the text is sharp when you zoom in.
- Take one photo per page, and keep them in order.
Upload
Upload the photos as image files, or put them into a PDF first. Say what you want, for example "turn this into braille" or "turn this into large print". See upload a document.
What ELLA does
ELLA reads the text in the photo with optical character recognition, and describes any pictures or diagrams on the page if you ask. See scanned PDFs for how OCR behaves and what to check.
Common problems
- Curved pages near a book's spine blur and bend the text. Press the book flat, or photograph each half separately.
- Glare from glossy paper hides words. Tilt the page a little, or turn off the flash.
- A photo that is very large may be refused. See file too big.
- Handwriting is harder to read than print. ELLA's handwriting reading is experimental.
Check it
Compare the result with the page for numbers, names and dates. The terms of service name text read from scans and photos as a place for care.
Still stuck?
Browse the help centre, or contact support and say what you were trying to do.