Sending the pages of a document in order from your phone

# Sending the pages of a document in order from your phone

Page nine, first

You have a tenancy agreement to get to someone before they fly in on Thursday. Fourteen pages, signed, on the kitchen table. The scanner at the office is two buses away. Your phone is in your hand.

So you photograph it. Page one, page two, all fourteen, laid flat, good light, sharp. You select them in order and send them on WhatsApp.

They open it in an airport. Page nine is first. Then page two. Then the signature page. Then page six, and so on — fourteen photos of a legal document in an order that means nothing. They spend twenty minutes squinting at the footer for page numbers, which are not on every page, and then message you: “Can you just send it as a PDF?”

You cannot, easily, because the scanner app crashed on page eleven twice already. So you send all fourteen again, one at a time, typing “page 1,” “page 2” before each. It takes ten minutes. It works. It is absurd.

Why pages come apart

The order you tap photos in is not stored in the photos. It is a list held by the app you were in, and when the batch goes to WhatsApp, iMessage or email, that list is usually dropped. What arrives is sorted by something else.

It is the same problem as sending any photos in chronological order, and documents are the worst case for it, because every page looks the same at thumbnail size. A shuffled set of holiday photos is annoying. A shuffled set of pages is unreadable, and the person on the other end cannot fix it, because there is nothing in the picture that says which page it is.

Why we built PicOrder

This is the one that started it.

PicOrder exists because of an assignment — pages of work, photographed one by one, sent in to be marked, and arriving in an order that made no sense. A marker who has to guess which page is first does not read; they skim. The work was fine. The order it landed in made it look careless.

There was no fix except sending each page as its own message. What we wanted was a page number on every page, put there before sending, so the person opening fourteen photos could read them as a document. Nothing did only that. So we built it — and then found that estate agents, tradespeople and people sending photos to their parents all had the same problem with different pictures. ## Send it with the page number in the picture

PicOrder stamps a number onto each photo in the order you choose. For a document, that number is the page number. Page one has a 1 in the corner. Page nine has a 9. The recipient opens fourteen photos in any order at all and reads them as a document, because the page numbers are on the pages.

1. Photograph the pages in order, flat, in decent light.
2. Open PicOrder, choose the photos, and check they are in page order. Drag any that are not.
3. Download or share to the chat.

It runs on your phone, and nothing is uploaded — for a signed lease or a contract, that is worth knowing. Free for up to ten pages; longer documents need Pro, which removes the limit.

When a PDF is the right answer

If your phone’s scanner works, use it. Notes on iPhone and Google Drive on Android both scan multi-page documents into one file, and one file cannot arrive out of order.

PicOrder is for when it does not — the crash, the oversized file, the phone that cannot open it — and for the things that were never going to be a PDF: three photos of a whiteboard, two pages of a notebook, the front and back of a form. Numbered photos are photos that still read as a document.

A few things that help

• Match the numbers to the printed page numbers if the document has them. Then there is no ambiguity at all.
• Put the number where it will not cover text. Bottom-right is the default; move it if the footer is busy.
• Send a line with it. “Lease, 14 pages, numbered.” Tells them to read the numbers, not the order.
• Keep the numbered set. If the document comes up again — and leases do — you have a copy that reads in order.

Thursday

They land, read the lease on the train from the airport, and sign it that evening. The second time you send it, it has page numbers on it, and it takes one message.