NewTwos

Write it down

Photos

iPhoneiPadAndroidWebMacWindowsLinuxWatchUpdated 2026-08-18

A thing can carry photos, and NewTwos can read the text inside them.

Why you'd care

Photographing something is the fastest capture there is. A whiteboard, a receipt, a page of a book, a label on the back of a bottle. Because the text inside is searchable, it is also a real filing strategy rather than a dead end.

The 60-second version

Add a photo from the capture bar or the edit bar. It attaches to the thing, which keeps whatever text it already had.

Step by step

Several photos on one thing

A thing can hold more than one. They stay together as a group, which is what you want for a set of pages or a few angles of the same object.

Cropping

Photos can be cropped when added. GIFs skip cropping, since cropping them would break the animation.

The text inside

NewTwos reads the text in your photos so search can find it later. That is what makes photographing a receipt useful six months on. See reading text in your photos.

Going further

Photograph rather than transcribe. For anything you only need to find again, a photo is faster and loses less than typing a summary.

Add a word of context. A photo with one typed word next to it is dramatically easier to find than a photo alone, because you will search the word before you remember the image.

Settings that change this

Tips

  • Photograph the thing, not a note about the thing.
  • Book pages, wine labels and business cards are the highest-value photos to capture, because the text does all the work later.

If it's not working

The photo will not upload. Usually a weak connection. It retries, and the thing is already saved with its text either way.

Search cannot find text I can clearly see. Text reading may be off, or the scan has not run yet on older photos. See reading text in your photos.