Add from photo

Schedules arrive as paper and PDFs: the swim team’s season, the school timetable, the clinic rota. Add from photo reads one and turns every repeating entry into a fixed event on your Google Calendar, so the scheduler plans around it from then on.

How it works

1. Open Add from photo from the sidebar, or Photo on a phone, and take a picture or choose a photo or PDF. A photo straight from the camera is fine; it is shrunk before it is sent.
2. Pensova reads the schedule, which takes ten to twenty seconds, and lists what it found: one row per entry, with the title, day, start and end. A timetable or season table gives weekly rows, with the first and last dates if it states them. A dated calendar, such as a week on the family display, gives one-off rows on their dates, and each row has a Repeats weekly switch if you know better than the page.
3. Check the list. Fix anything it misread, untick anything you do not want, and type a name in For if the schedule is one person's (Billy, say): it goes in front of every title, so the calendar reads “Billy · Practice” and not “Practice” twice. Then press Add to Google Calendar. Each row becomes a fixed event, on its day or every week, like one you would make with Block fixed time.

What to know

• Weekly blocks start from the first matching day on or after today, or from the schedule’s own start date if it has one, and repeat until its last date if it has one. A blank last date means no end. A dated entry is one event on that day, even if the day has passed.
• They are fixed events: the scheduler never moves them, only works around them. Edit or delete them in Google Calendar, as with any block.
• Only the picture is sent to the model that reads it, together with your time zone; it is not stored. The reading counts as one model call against the same limit as plain-words capture.
• A sharp photo of the whole page, taken square on, reads best. If the list comes back empty or odd, the note under it says what was hard to read; try closer in.