Reading a whole shelf

Cataloguing a shelf one barcode at a time is the slowest thing the app asks of anyone, and older books have no barcode at all. From the Library screen, under More, "Scan a shelf" photographs a row of books and reads the spines — so a shelf you have never catalogued has somewhere to start other than typing.

1. On the Library tab, tap More and choose "Scan a shelf".
2. Optionally say which shelf you are pointing at, from your library’s own locations — the choice sits above the viewfinder, before you press the shutter, and the shelf you pick stays on screen while you aim. Leaving it unset works exactly as before.
3. If the bookcase in front of you is not in the catalogue yet, "Add a location…" in that same choice names it there and then, and it becomes the chosen shelf without your leaving the frame you are standing in front of. That is why the choice is offered even in a library with no locations at all — the shelf being photographed for the first time is the commonest shelf the catalogue has never heard of. Guests, who cannot make locations, are not asked.
4. Hold the phone level and fill the frame with the shelves. One frame usually holds about two rows, and the top and bottom of the picture will cut through some spines — that is expected, not a mistake.
5. In a dim room, tap the torch button beside the shutter. Poor light is what the spine reading suffers from most.
6. Wait while the phone reads it and looks the readings up. What comes back is a list to review, not a list of books that have been added.
7. Work down the list: tick what you recognise, choose "Edit" to correct what was misread, and "Stop offering this" to take a row off the list for good. All three stick — photographing more of the bookcase does not undo them.
8. The shelf can still be changed in the review, if you named the wrong one — that decides where the books you add are recorded. Leaving it unset adds them with no location, as before.
9. Choose "Photograph another shelf" to carry on along the bookcase. Overlapping frames are fine — a book seen in two photographs is shown once, using the fuller reading. The shelf you chose stays chosen.
10. Choose "Add N books" when the list says what you own. Only ticked rows are added.

The reading happens on the phone itself. Only the text travels, so the shelf can be read in a room with no signal; turning that text into books is the half that needs one, and the app says which is which rather than reporting an empty shelf. Every copy of the photograph on the phone — including the one it makes to read from — is deleted the moment the text has been read, whatever else you have chosen.

What happens to the photograph itself is your library’s choice, and there are three answers. The screen above the shutter tells you which one applies before you take it, so you never have to remember a setting somebody else made.

Read on the phone and deleted — this is what every library does until somebody changes it, and it is what the app did before the setting existed. The photograph is never uploaded.

Kept — the photograph is stored in your library’s own private storage. Only your library’s owners and whoever took it can open it — not other members, not guests, and not anyone holding a link, because there is no link: the picture is fetched through your signed-in session and has no web address at all. It never appears in a showcase, an export, the public catalogue, or anywhere else that leaves your library.

Kept and read again by a vision service — a separate choice again, and one that has to be made on purpose: the photograph leaves your library to be read by a vision model, which identifies far more spines than a phone can. Turning keeping on does not turn this on, and it cannot be turned on at all unless keeping is.

Both settings are your library owner’s to make, under Library setup → Shelf photographs, on the website as well as in the app. Both are off to begin with. The same screen lists whatever has been kept — each named by the shelf it is a photograph of, with when it was taken and by whom underneath, and what it all adds up to — and deletes them one at a time or all at once. A photograph taken without naming a shelf, or kept before the app could ask, is listed by its date instead; no shelf is invented for it. Nothing expires on its own: a photograph you chose to keep is there until somebody deletes it. Whoever took a photograph can always delete it, whatever their role — you should not have to ask an owner to withdraw a picture of your own front room.

What survives the read either way is a small picture of each spine, cut out of the photograph and shown beside its reading so you can judge a row by looking at the book rather than by parsing mangled lettering. Tap one to see it full-screen when the row size is not enough. Those pictures stay on the phone, are never uploaded, and are deleted when you leave the scan — whether or not you added anything.

Only some rows carry a picture, and the screen says so rather than leaving it looking like a fault. Cutting a spine out of the photograph is slow on an older phone, so a fixed number are taken from each frame; a spine the camera could not locate at all — in a picture that would not decode, or a shelf read by text position rather than by its boards — has no strip to cut and gets none.

Be warned what this is for: it gets a shelf started, and it does not catalogue a shelf. Spine printing is display lettering, often foiled, often gloss, and read sideways — so most rows come back needing a look, and the app shows you what it actually read next to what it thinks the book is. That is deliberate: a mangled reading can resolve confidently to a real book that is not on your shelf, and seeing the raw text is how you catch it. Nothing is added until you tick it.

Each reading is looked up in the AllMyBooks catalogue first and, where the catalogue does not have the book, in other book catalogues, Open Library among them, so a shelf nobody has catalogued before still finds its books; those rows say "New to AllMyBooks". A book is offered only when its title is really on the spine — a near title that is a different book is left out rather than shown as "something close" — and only a match with the author on the spine agreeing is ticked for you. A title with no author printed beside it is at most a guess to check, and a title so common that the first result means nothing is not offered at all.

Correcting a reading searches the catalogue again with what you typed, so a mangled spine you can read yourself can still find the right record instead of only ever creating a new one. Anything it finds is offered for you to tick — never ticked for you, because you supplied a better search, not a confirmation. If it finds nothing, the row is still added under exactly the text you typed.

A spine cut by the edge of the frame is flagged as cut and offered for checking rather than as a match, however confident the lookup was — half a title is often enough to find a whole wrong book. Spines the camera could not read at all do not appear in the list, and the app says so instead of implying the list is the shelf.

Latin lettering is what the phone can read. Russian, Greek and other non-Latin spines are not read badly — they are not read at all, on either phone — so a shelf of them will come back empty. Those books are best added by barcode or by hand.

Where your phone cannot identify a spine, and where your server has it configured, the list offers "Ask the server to try". This is a separate, deliberate act and it works differently: it takes a NEW photograph and uploads it, and the app says so before the camera opens. It sends nothing until you have both agreed and taken that photograph, and whatever the server proposes is reviewed and confirmed by you exactly like everything else. It takes a new photograph rather than reusing the one just read because a picture that leaves your phone should be one taken for that purpose — which is the same reason sending a kept photograph to a vision service is its own setting rather than something keeping turns on.

Scanning a shelf is available to Library admins and members; Guests are not offered it. Reading the shelf works with no signal, while identifying the books needs one. Asking the server to try is shown only where your library has that turned on.