Make old diaries, notebooks and family archives searchable

1. Photograph or scan the pages. On the phone, tap Old notebook on the camera: the iPhone's document scanner opens again after each round. Or use a camera and number the files in page order.
2. Upload in the browser. Under Scans choose Bring in an old notebook, a notebook and all the photos or PDFs at once. The files go in by their names, Photo 2 before Photo 10.
3. Say roughly when. Optional: write a range under Roughly when, for example 1998–2003. It helps date pages that carry no date.
4. Wait until it is read. Archive pages are read after normal pages. When the notebook is done, you get one notification.
5. Check the dates. Guessed dates are marked ≈. Set the date fixes them in the browser.

Grandparents' diaries, travel notes from the nineties, notebooks from university, letters in a box: most of it goes unread because nobody knows what is where. Typing it up takes weeks, and a scan alone doesn't make the text searchable.

Axsuro's archive mode is made to bring in many old pages in one evening. They are read like any other page, except that nothing on them becomes something to do today.

• Read line by line: the text, headings, drawings, formulas and tables, # and @, and the date if it is written on the page.
• Nothing to confirm, nothing goes out: no tasks, events, emails or sends are made. A todo: from 2009 is not a task today. The lines stay on the page, marked "From the archive". If you need something from it, turn it into a task by hand.
• The date: what is written on the page, else the date of the page before, else the file's date, else the start of Roughly when, else the upload day. Every guessed date is shown with ≈, for example "≈ 14 March 2019".
• Found everywhere afterwards: in search, in Ask, under Thoughts and in "On this day" on Home, by the date the page was written.

If you share a notebook with your family, they see the pages the way you share them: to view or, from Plus, to edit.

Archive pages come once per account or workspace, not every month, and they never take pages of the month away:

• Free: 50 archive pages
• Plus: 300
• Pro: 1,000
• Business: 1,000 per seat, pooled

A page counts once it is brought in. Deleting it later doesn't give it back. Plan details are on the pricing page.

Axsuro reads twelve languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Croatian, Turkish, Ukrainian and Russian. Old scripts such as German Kurrent or Sütterlin are not something Axsuro promises to read. Faded ink, very small writing or thin paper with the back showing through make reading harder.

Our advice: bring in a few pages first, look at how well they are read, then decide. The photo of every page is always kept, even when a word was misread.

Axsuro isn't genealogy software either. It builds no family trees and links no people to records. It makes your pages readable and searchable.

• Photograph in daylight or even light, without flash.
• Lay the book flat and take one page per photo.
• Axsuro crops the page but doesn't straighten it. Hold the phone as parallel to the page as you can.
• Photos up to 15 MB as JPEG, PNG, WebP or HEIC, PDFs up to 50 pages per file.

For the notebook you are writing in now, see Digitise your notebook.

• How to digitise handwritten notes and keep writing on paper
  How to digitise handwritten notes and whole notebooks, old pages and PDFs included. Then search, ask, organise and export everything you wrote.
• How to convert handwriting to text (2026)
  How to convert handwriting to text: typing it up, Google Lens, a tablet or an app that reads whole pages. Pros, cons and tips for clean recognition.
• Leuchtturm or Moleskine with Axsuro: how to set up your notebook
  Your Leuchtturm1917 or Moleskine stays as it is. Set it up with Axsuro: a date, markers, headings, a photo, and every page you write becomes searchable.
• How to make old diaries and notebooks searchable
  Digitise old diaries: bring in whole notebooks at once, Axsuro reads and dates every page with nothing to confirm. Then search them and ask them questions.