How to scan and photograph papers so every answer can be read

Step by step

1. Prepare the pages. Take out staples, flatten folded corners, and put every page the same way up and in order.
2. Check the settings. On a scanner, choose PDF, colour or greyscale, and turn off blank-page removal.
3. Capture one test page. Zoom in on the smallest writing. If you can't tell a 1 from a 7 or see a decimal point, fix the problem before doing the rest.
4. Capture the rest. Keep the same light, distance and settings for the whole set.
5. Count and check. Compare the page count with the pages you expected, then look through the first, middle and last papers.

Should you use a scanner or a phone?

Use a scanner for a class set if you have one, and a phone when you have only a few pages or no scanner nearby.

What light works best for photographing papers?

Bright, even light works best, such as daylight near a window but out of direct sun. Your own body and phone often cast the shadow, so stand where the light falls on the page from the side or the front. Turn the flash off if you see glare, as it can bounce off pencil and glossy paper.

What angle and focus do you need?

Hold the phone directly above the page, with the camera parallel to the paper, and tap the writing to focus. A tilted shot makes the far side of the page smaller and softer. Take one page per photo, flatten curved pages, and move closer instead of using digital zoom.

What resolution and scan settings should you use?

A sensible starting point is 200 to 300 DPI in colour or greyscale, though that is a suggestion and not a fixed rule. Avoid the one-colour black and white mode, because it forces every dot to pure black or white and can erase faint pencil.

Higher settings mostly give you bigger files. evaleasy scales each page to at most 2,000 pixels on its longest side before reading it, so a 600 DPI scan gains nothing, and two pages in one photo share that detail. The limit is 20 MB per uploaded file.

How much margin should you keep?

Keep all four edges of the page in the frame, with a little space around them. Margins hold question numbers, printed marks, student names and answers squeezed in from the side. On a bubble sheet, the row numbers and column headers are how a reader follows each row. Check any auto-crop result, because nothing can recover what isn't in the image.

Does pencil or pen scan better?

Dark pen scans best, dark pencil usually scans well, and faint pencil is where you are most likely to lose detail. A few instructions before the test save problems later:

• Ask for black or dark blue pen where the exam allows it, and avoid pale gel inks
• For pencil bubble sheets, use a dark pencil such as 2B and fill each bubble fully
• Erase completely, since a ghost mark beside a new one creates real doubt
• To change an answer, cross it out with one clear line
• Scan thin paper with a dark sheet behind it, so writing on the back shows through less

How should you handle double-sided and blank pages?

Scan both sides if students may have written on the backs. If you'll split a stack by a fixed page count, keep the blank backs and turn off "skip blank pages". With two sheets printed on both sides, each student has 4 pages. If one student leaves a back empty and the scanner drops it, that student has 3, and everyone after them is one page out.

If papers are printed on one side only, scan one side only. evaleasy charges one credit per page, blank pages included, so take out blank pages once each student has their own file.

Which file format should you use?

PDF is usually the simplest choice because it keeps a student's pages together and in order. This is what evaleasy accepts:

How do you turn iPhone HEIC photos into JPEG?

For new photos, go to Settings, Camera, Formats and choose Most Compatible, and the iPhone will save JPEGs from then on. For photos you have already taken, open them on a Mac in Preview, choose File, then Export, and pick JPEG. Scanning with the iPhone's Notes or Files app avoids the problem, because it produces a PDF.

How do you keep pages in the right order?

Put every student's pages in the same order before you scan, because answers can run across pages and a marker reads a file from first page to last.

• Stack each paper with page 1 on top and all pages the same way up
• Separate sheets that stick together, since a double feed silently loses a page
• Ask students to number any extra sheets
• Upload a student's phone photos in page order, as evaleasy reads them in upload order

Common questions

Will a photo sent over WhatsApp still be readable?

Often, but messaging apps usually compress photos, which can blur faint writing. Use the original file where you can, or send the photo as a document, which keeps its quality.

Should I use a scanning app's enhance filter?

Try it on one page first. A filter that whitens the background can make dark ink cleaner, but it can also wipe out faint pencil and light marks.

What if a page comes out sideways or upside down?

evaleasy turns photos upright using the orientation stored in the file, and a report can note a rotated page. For scanned PDFs, feed every page the same way up, and rotate any stragglers before uploading.

What happens if a page is too blurry to read?

In evaleasy, a paper that can't be read at all isn't marked, and its credits are refunded automatically. If only parts are hard to read, the paper is still marked and whatever can't be made out earns no marks, so rescan it if the scan is the cause.