Friday, October 26, 2012

Turn Your Smartphone Camera into a Pocketable Photographic Memory

Several apps exist to help you remember the many things you'd otherwise forget, but perhaps none are quite as useful and efficient as your camera. Typing takes time. Snapping a photo only takes a moment, and there are so many ways you can remind yourself better with nothing but a picture.

Remember Who Borrowed That Book (or Whatever)

The folks over at Apartment Therapy came up with a clever solution to the problem of remembering who borrowed your stuff: take a picture of them and the thing they borrowed, then save it to an album of borrowed items.

Keep Track of Emergency Information

Whether you're taking pictures of insurance cards or prescription medicine, an emergency photo album can be useful in two important ways. First, if you need any of that information when you go to the doctor or pharmacy, it's right in your phone for easy access. Second, if you're in an emergency and need to provide information quickly, you can tell people that your information is in your phone.

Build a Wish List

We all want a lot of things we can't have, and so we stick them on wish lists for a day when the money's available and our desire to buy is ever-present. When you're on the go and want to remember something to purchase, just snap a photo and save it in a "wish list" album.

Take Notes

If you need to copy down some text, snapping a photo is much faster than typing it into you phone. On top of that, you can send the photo to an app like Evernote and make that text searchable thanks to the magic of optical character recognition (OCR).

Take Screenshots of Anything on Your Phone You Want to Remember

Although not really a photograph, exactly, screenshots end up in the same place when you take them. Sometimes when you're on your phone, you want to remember an app to buy on a later date, save a map for offline use, save a copy of a movie ticket that came into your email, or remember a specific alert. Save those as screenshots, sort them into the relevant reminder albums, and you won't forget.

Secure Your Photos

Perhaps you don't want important photographic information easily accessible on your phone. One way to secure your photos is to use a password to lock your entire phone. If you just want to hide your photos, however, there are apps that can help you out. Ben the Bodyguard ($5, iPhone) and Hide It Pro (Free, Android) both get the job done.