Photo to deck

Snap or upload a photo of your notes — textbook page, lecture slide, handwritten notes — and get an Anki deck back.

Photo to deck takes a single image and sends it to Claude's vision model, which reads the content and returns question-and-answer cards. The page is at 2anki.net/photo-to-deck.

Plan: Free plan gets 5 photos per month. Paid plans use AI credits.

When to use this

• A textbook page, lecture slide, or photographed page of notes you want as flashcards.
• Handwritten notes — Claude reads cursive and printed handwriting reasonably well.
• A whiteboard photo from class or a study session.

If your source is already a file — PDF, markdown, a Notion page — use the standard upload flow on the home page instead. Photo to deck is for the moments where the easiest input is a photo.

Build a deck

1. Open 2anki.net/photo-to-deck. You'll need to be signed in.
2. (Optional) Name the deck. The default uses the photo's filename.
3. Pick a card density (more on this below).
4. Add a photo. Two ways:
   • Take a photo — on a phone, this opens the rear camera directly.
   • Drop or pick — drag an image into the dropzone, or click to open a file picker.
5. (Optional) Toggle Show source image on the back of each card off if you only want text on the back. Default is on.
6. Click Get flashcards. The deck downloads as a .apkg when ready.

The page shows the number of cards extracted once the deck arrives. Open the file in Anki to import.

Supported formats and size

• Image types: JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF.
• Size cap: 10 MB per photo. If you hit the cap, take the photo at a lower resolution or compress it before upload.
• Very large images are also bounded by a token ceiling on the model side — if you see a "photo is too large" message even under 10 MB, the resolution is the issue, not the file size.

Card density

The three chips under the deck name decide how many cards per image:

• Sparse — 3 to 5 cards. Diagrams, single-concept slides, vocabulary lists where you want headline facts only.
• Balanced — 6 to 10 cards. The default. Matches the typical output of the prior fixed prompt — start here.
• Dense — 12 to 20 cards. Textbook pages, dense lecture slides, photographed notes where you want every distinct fact fanned out.

The model targets the range; it doesn't always hit the exact count. Your choice is remembered between sessions on the same browser.

What ends up on the card

• Front: the question or term Claude extracted from the image.
• Back: the answer or definition. If Show source image on the back of each card is on (default), the original photo is embedded under the answer text so you can verify against the source while reviewing.
• Tags: every card arrives with 1 to 3 topic tags drawn from the actual content — short, lowercase, snake_case (enzymes, michaelis_menten). Filter by tag in Anki's tag browser to study a subset.

Free plan and quota

The free plan is capped at 5 photos per calendar month — vision calls cost real money on our side. When you hit the limit, the page shows how many you've used and a path to upgrade. The counter resets on the 1st of each month.

Paid plans (Subscription or Lifetime) draw on AI credits instead of the free monthly count — far more photos, up to your credit allowance.

Tips for better results

• Crop tight. If only a quarter of the photo is the content you care about, crop it before upload. Claude wastes tokens (and your quota) reading the rest.
• Daylight beats fluorescents. Sharp, high-contrast photos extract more cleanly than dim or shadowed ones.
• One slide per photo. A photo of two textbook pages at once forces the model to choose what to prioritize. Two single-page photos usually beat one double-page photo.
• Handwriting works — neat handwriting works better. If yours is illegible to a friend, it'll be illegible to Claude too.
• Tried Balanced and got too few cards? Switch to Dense and re-upload. Re-running costs another quota point on the free plan, so pick the density before the first run when you can.

When something doesn't work

• "Photo is too large" — the image's resolution exceeds the vision model's token ceiling. Reduce resolution or take a tighter crop.
• "Free plan is 5 photos per month" — you've hit the cap. Wait until the 1st, or upgrade.
• The cards came back wrong or sparse — try the same photo at a higher density. If Dense still produces too few cards, the image is probably too low-contrast for the model to read confidently. Retake with better light.
• You'd rather draw your own card boundaries on a diagram — use Image occlusion instead. Photo to deck is for question-and-answer extraction; image occlusion is for spatial "what's behind the cover" cards.