Take a photo Takarda reads well.

01Why the photo matters

Takarda reads what the picture shows. When the words are sharp and the whole page is in the photo, each value comes back with a box around the place it was found, and you can check it at a glance.

When a corner is cut off, or the print is lost in a shadow, the value that sat there can only come back as Not on the page, or marked Check so a person looks at it. You do not need a scanner. A phone held the right way is enough.

02Lay the page flat

Put the paper on a table, not in your hand and not on your lap. A darker table helps, because the white page stands out and its edges are easy to find.

• Smooth out folds and creases with your palm before you take the photo.
• Hold a curled receipt flat at its ends with two fingers, and keep your fingers off the printed part.
• Hold the phone straight above the page, not at an angle, so the top and bottom lines are the same width.

03Use daylight and turn the flash off

Daylight from a window is the best light there is. Stand so that the light falls across the page and your own shadow, and the shadow of the phone, fall away from it.

Turn the flash off. On shiny paper, thermal receipts and laminated cards, a flash leaves a bright white patch, and any number under that patch is gone. If the room is dark, move to a window rather than using the flash.

Before you press the button, tap the screen on the words so the phone focuses on them, and hold still for a moment after.

04Get all four corners in

Fill most of the screen with the page, but leave a thin strip of table showing on every side. Takarda finds the edge of the page from its four corners, and uses them to straighten the picture.

Totals, stamps and signatures often sit at the very bottom of a page, so look at the bottom edge before you take the photo. A total that is cut off cannot be checked against the lines above it.

05One page in each photo

Take each page on its own. Two pages side by side in one photo are smaller and harder to read, and their values can end up mixed together.

Each photo you upload is its own file, and each file gives you one row. For a document with several pages, a PDF from a scanner app keeps the pages together, so the whole document comes back as one row. A file can have up to 100 pages.

06No filters, no edits

Send the photo as the camera took it. Beauty filters, strong black and white modes and heavy sharpening can wipe out faint print, stamps and handwriting. Cropping by hand can cut off a corner Takarda needs.

If the photo reaches you on WhatsApp, ask the sender to send it as a document. That keeps the full picture. A squeezed photo still uploads, but small print may blur.

07What Takarda does with a poor photo

Every page is turned upright first. Takarda then finds the edge of the page and straightens a tilted photo, so a page shot at a slant reads like a flat one. Your original is kept exactly as it came.

It also looks at how readable the photo is: fine, blurry, dark, cropped, too small, or with no words on it. A page that is still too poor to read is marked, every value on it comes back marked Check at best, and you are asked to take the picture again.

08A quick check before you upload

1. The page is flat and fills most of the screen.
2. All four corners are in, with a little table showing round them.
3. The flash is off and no shadow or bright patch covers the words.
4. The words are sharp when you zoom in on the photo.
5. One page in each photo, with no filter on it.