Scanning a printed pattern

Last updated 15 August 2026

Add part → Scan → Take a photo. The page is read by text recognition running inside your browser tab — the photo is never uploaded anywhere — and the recognised text goes through the same parser as pasted text, into a round list you review before anything is saved.

Getting a photo the recogniser likes

Flat, filling the frame, decent light. The classic scanning advice applies. Shadows and keystone angles cost more accuracy than an older phone camera does.
Clean print works best. Books, magazines and printed PDFs read well. Handwriting and heavily decorated fonts are hit-and-miss — for those, expect to fix a few rounds by hand in the review screen.
Several photos are fine. A pattern spanning two pages can be scanned as multiple photos in one go (use "Choose files", or drag them in on desktop); they're read in order and treated as one text.
Coloured labels are fine too. Photos are automatically straightened by orientation, upscaled when small, and converted to high-contrast greyscale in a way that keeps coloured round numbers dark.

The limits, honestly

English only. The recognition model that ships with Yarn Diary is trained on English, and the parser's stitch vocabulary is the English abbreviations — a pattern written in another language won't be understood. The exception is symbol notation (X V A rounds, common in translated amigurumi patterns), which is detected and expanded into sc/inc/dec automatically.
First scan needs a connection. The recognition engine is a large component, so it is fetched the first time you scan and cached from then on. Scan something once while online and scanning works offline afterwards.
It tells you when it struggled. A hard-to-read photo produces a warning toast, and individual words the recogniser was unsure about are flagged on their rounds in the review list — "Unsure about …" — so you know exactly where to look. A flagged word whose round's arithmetic checks out anyway is quietly unflagged; if the counts agree, the misread didn't matter.

The review screen is the safety net

Nothing is written to your project until you confirm the recognised list. On the review screen every round shows its instruction and its stitch count check; you can edit any round, skip lines that aren't rounds, rename parts, change how many copies a part needs, or flip US/UK terms for everything at once. The scanned photo itself is kept with the project as a "Pattern scan" photo, so the original page stays one tap away while you crochet. If the result is beyond saving, Discard throws the whole scan away — your project is untouched.

When recognition just won't cooperate

Some pages lose to glare or typography. The fallback order: retake the photo in flatter light; try the PDF instead if you have one (digital PDFs skip recognition entirely); or paste the text — most pattern PDFs let you select and copy. And if a specific pattern consistently defeats the scanner, send it over (with the designer's permission) — mangled patterns are exactly the bug reports that improve the parser.