Apps to Take (and Clean Up) Photos of a Whiteboard

I do a lot of whiteboarding in my work, and an equal amount of taking-a-picture-of-it-and-sending-it-to-everyone-afterwards. (You know what I’m talkin’ about.) Sometimes this works, but usually the photo looks terrible and you look like a sloppy fool.

You can do better. These apps either capture the photo and process it or “scan” it after the fact, cleaning it up to get the results you see above.

Scanbot is a free download, and you can import an existing photo and process it with their “Magic Color” filter without unlocking the paid features. The UI is pretty slick, and they even have an Android version.

Scanner Pro is $3.99 but allows you more fine-grained control if you like to fiddle with things.

Evernote has a free companion app called Scannable that is designed to save what you capture to your Evernote account. This quick capture flow is super smooth, and I use it for paper receipts all the time. That said, I’ve gotten mixed results with whiteboards.

If you are trying to take a photo of a whiteboard with many sticky notes on it, the Post-it folks have released an app exactly for this purpose. It handles that scenario well and even exports to PowerPoint for your boss!