Picture documents

Picture documents

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Instead of scanning & emailing documents to me, clients often take a picture of the document with their phone and text it as a picture message. I always ask them to resend the doucment my email! As I'm not able to store this on the system

Do you have that experience & how have you handled it?

Replies (5)

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Stepurhan
By stepurhan
09th Feb 2015 07:56

Do you need to store?

Whilst it is helpful to store copies yourself, do you actually need to store all client documents? If the picture shows you what you need, then knowing the client has the original should be enough. I am assuming we are talking about individual documents requested here, not their entire records.

I don't know about other smartphones, but I'm pretty sure my iPhone allows you to save picture messages to the phone photo albums. You can then transfer by data cable afterwards. A bit of a hassle but an alternative for the odd occasion.

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By mrme89
09th Feb 2015 08:00

Sounds like you need to train your clients to ensure they send it by email only.

In the meantime...
Do you have a smartphone? If so, you should be able to save the image and email it to yourself pretty quickly.

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By DMGbus
09th Feb 2015 08:06

Legibility

The only issue that sometimes arises with documents sent to me by clients is legibility.

eg.  Online authorisation code photographed with mobile phone and forwarded to me by eMail - blurred illegible image received.  But then, I've also received scanned documents scanned at too low a resolution (ie. 75dpi instead of 200 dpi) and they've been illegible too.

Either way if the original image is OK then no problem.   I find electronic documents infinitely preferable to paper documents, the method of creating the image is irrelevant (ie. old fashioned scanner or modern phone camera), .jpg images are fine (sometimes I get .png docs that are a bigger file size than jpeg images and .bmps format that are far too high a file size.

 

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Stepurhan
By stepurhan
09th Feb 2015 10:37

Easily converted

PNG and BMP are both higher resolution formats for pictures than JPG. JPG is what is known as a "lossy" format. It's better suited to documents where there is a gradual change of colour (e.g. photos) because it essentially blurs the picture, but in a way that human perception won't normally notice if transitions are meant to be smooth. The loss of detail at sharp edges will be obvious most of the time.

MS Paint, which comes with all Windows PCs, can convert between the formats if storage is an issue. I should imagine a similar program exists on Macs.

 

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By LuKosro
09th Feb 2015 09:55

Hi

You could ask them to send the images via Whatsapp or Viber and then send it to an online storage application such as Dropbox or send it yourself to your email.

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