Everything about the accuracy of a conversion is decided before the upload. The model reads what the photo contains; it cannot recover a move that a shadow ate or a fold cut in half. This page is about the input side — what makes a photo convert cleanly, and how to tell in five seconds whether to reshoot.
The four things that decide it
Light, evenly. Daylight near a window beats any lamp. The specific failure to avoid is your own shadow: leaning over the sheet with a phone puts a dark band across exactly the columns you care about. Step to the side of the light instead of between it and the paper. Flash is worse than no flash — it burns a white disc into the middle of the sheet.
Flat. A scoresheet that has spent the afternoon folded in a pocket will have creases straight through the move columns, and a crease breaks the strokes of a letter. Press it flat under two books for a minute before you shoot. Reverse-fold a stubborn one.
Square on. Hold the phone parallel to the paper, not tilted across the desk. A tilted shot compresses the far end of the sheet, and compressed rows are where column alignment starts to slip — white's move drifting into black's column.
Filling the frame. All four corners inside the edges, and nothing else. Table around the sheet is wasted resolution: every pixel spent on wood grain is a pixel not spent on a letter.
Sheets that need more than one photo
Double-sided and multi-page sheets are normal, and they do not need to be handled one at a time. Upload every image in a single scan — the moves are merged in reading order and it is charged as one scan, whether that is one image or four. A scan takes up to 10 images of 15 MB each, as JPG, PNG or WebP; HEIC is not accepted, so save an iPhone photo as JPG first.
Shoot them in order. Reordering after the fact is possible but tedious, and it is the one part of this that a computer cannot guess for you.
Checking it in five seconds
After recognition, moves that failed the rules are marked red and moves the model was unsure of amber, with the legal alternatives to pick from; that is your entire review list, and Scan chess notation explains why it is short.
The useful signal is the number of colored moves. One or two is normal handwriting variance. More than about five usually means the photo, not the handwriting: a shadow, a tilt, a fold. Reshooting takes fifteen seconds and is almost always faster than editing your way out of a bad capture.
What the file looks like
You get standard PGN: the seven-tag header with the players, event, date and result, followed by the movetext. It opens in Lichess, Chess.com, ChessBase, SCID and anything else that reads chess. What the format actually contains is covered on Chess PGN converter.
Related
- Convert a chess scoresheet to PGN — the complete process, start to finish
- Chess scoresheet scanner — what the tool is, what it costs, where it runs
- How to get a clean scan — the long version of this page, with a pre-upload checklist
Ten seconds spent on the photo saves more than it costs. Take the picture properly and the rest is automatic.