How to make a whiteboard photo readable.

## Why whiteboard photos look bad

Three things destroy whiteboard photo readability:

1. Perspective distortion — shooting from below or to the side stretches text at the edges
2. Glare — overhead lighting reflects directly off the board surface and wipes out content
3. Low contrast — light-colored markers (yellow, orange, light blue) on white boards disappear in photos

Each has a fix.

## Fix 1: Perspective correction

Apple VisionKit — built into Notes, Files, and BoardSnap — runs a rectangle detection pass and applies a homography transform to flatten the image. You don't need to stand directly in front of a large board; the app corrects for angle digitally.

To trigger it in BoardSnap: open the camera view, let the quad (yellow bounding box) lock to the board, tap once. The corrected image appears in under a second.

If you're using the plain camera and editing after the fact, iOS Photos has a Geometry > Perspective correction tool that manually achieves the same result — but it's slower and requires you to drag the corners.

## Fix 2: Shoot to avoid glare

Glare is caused by the angle of incidence between the light source, the board surface, and your lens. To avoid it:

• Move your body slightly to the left or right of the direct reflection point. Even a 15-degree horizontal shift eliminates most glare.
• Use VisionKit's angle correction to compensate for the non-head-on position.
• Turn off half the overhead lights if the room has a dual-zone switch.
• Edge lighting (light source to the side, not above) almost entirely eliminates glare on flat boards.

## Fix 3: Contrast and color choice

• Use dark markers — black, dark blue, dark green — for primary content
• Reserve light colors for decorative highlights only
• Clean the board before the meeting — ghost marks from previous sessions lower effective contrast even when they're not consciously visible

## Fix 4: Resolution and distance

For a standard 8-foot conference room board, you need to be within about 10 feet to capture adequate resolution for AI text extraction. The iPhone 15 Pro's 48MP main sensor gives you margin; older iPhones at 12MP need to be closer.

## Fix 5: Let AI do the reading

If the photo is already taken and it's readable but tedious — text is small, the image is big — the fastest path is to run it through BoardSnap or paste it into ChatGPT/Claude and ask for a transcription. The AI handles the legibility work for you.