Photos

If you read on paper, photograph the pages you marked and Becoming reads them for you — keeping the passages you underlined, highlighted, or bracketed in the margin. Screenshots from an e-reader or reading app work the same way.

This is a one-time import, not a live sync. Send a new set of photos whenever you’ve marked up more pages.

Import photos from the web app

1. In the web app, open Integrations and choose Photo import.
2. Pick the book the pages came from — search your library, or add a new book by title and author.
3. Add up to 10 pages from the same book. On a phone you can take the photos right there; on a desktop, choose files.
4. Choose Import highlights and wait — the pages are read one at a time, so a full set takes a couple of minutes.

Your highlights appear when the capture finishes, along with a count of the pages that were read.

Import photos by email

You can also attach photos to an email and send it to your Becoming address. This is handy straight from a phone’s camera roll.

Because email can’t ask which book the pages came from, Becoming works it out from:

• the subject line — put the book’s title (and author) there;
• a photo of the cover included with the pages;
• the title repeated in the running heads across several pages.

If none of those answer it, you’ll get a reply asking which book it was, rather than the highlights being filed under a guess. Email attachments must already be JPEG, PNG, or WebP — an iPhone’s HEIC photos need to be converted first, or sent through the web app instead, which converts them for you.

What Becoming keeps

If anything on the page is marked, only the marked passages are kept. Becoming recognises:

• Pen or pencil underlining
• A highlighter stripe
• A bracket or vertical line in the margin
• A box drawn around text
• A reading app’s highlight colour behind the text

If nothing on the page is marked, Becoming keeps up to 5 of the page’s most notable passages instead — the same behaviour as a web article.

Passages are copied in the author’s exact words. Words split across a line break are rejoined, but nothing is paraphrased or invented.

Good to know

• Up to 10 pages per capture, all from the same book.
• JPEG, PNG, and WebP, up to 5 MB each. The web app resizes and re-encodes photos before upload, so a phone photo — including an iPhone’s HEIC — is handled for you.
• A page that’s too blurry, dark, or angled to read is skipped, and the rest of the capture still lands. The result tells you how many pages were skipped.
• Highlights are deduplicated by content, so photographing the same page twice never creates a copy.

AI credits

Reading a page is AI work, so each photographed page costs 1 AI credit — including a cover, or a page too blurry to make out. The credit pays for the model looking at the page, not for what it finds there.

If you run out mid-capture, the pages already read still land. The rest are kept exactly as they are, and we pull their highlights once you have credits again. See How AI Credits Work.

Tips for a good photo

• Get the whole page in frame, square-on rather than at an angle.
• Even light beats bright light — avoid a hard shadow or glare across the text.
• One page per photo. A two-page spread reads fine, but a single page reads better.

See also

• Import Overview — all the ways to bring highlights in.
• Email — set up the address you can mail photos to.
• Book Search — add a paper book without photographing it.
• Import Failures — if a capture comes back empty.