Best app for scanning board diagram images - my recommendation

This topic is about getting board positions into a chess app from images in pdf files or web pages, or from a camera. It's a very handy function, as we see a lot of board diagrams in a lot of places these days. But it is tedious and often inaccurate to try to put in all the pieces manually.

I experimented with a couple of apps on my Android phone (Chessvision and ChessEye) which are available on the Google Play Store. Here are my conclusions.

With both apps, I found the best way to get scans of board diagrams located in a pdf file, for example, is to first take a screenshot, making it as large as possible on the screen to improve FEN accuracy. Then I directed these two apps to the screenshot image on my phone so they could generate a FEN for it.

Both apps worked well and did the job. Incidentally, they both need to be online to work. Overall, I prefer the ChessEye app. The disadavantages of Chessvision are:

1. It is a large app (55 mb).

2. You have to sign in with Google/Log in with email. I hate this kind of data harvesting. Why on earth do I need to sign in to a Google account to scan chess board diagrams? It's digital leeching of the worst sort.

3. The app stores a lot of data, bulking up its size on my phone even more.

4. There is a restriction on the number of scans in any 24-hour period. I think I managed 25 - 30 scans or so before it stopped working. If you want more, you have to pay a monthly or annual fee. This restriction is not mentioned in the app description.

ChessEye, on the other hand, has these advantages:

1. The app is half the size (26 mb)
2. There is no need to log in to Google or give your email address.
3. It stores less data on my phone.
4. There is no restriction on daily scans, at least from my experience.

5. It is a free app - there is no monthly or annual fee to pay.

And after comparing their accuracy, I can confidently say that ChessEye is just as good as Chessvision at generating FENs from board scans.

The Chessvision app has an extra feature which matches a scanned position with a video on YouTube (if it exists). Some may find this helpful, though I never used it.

So I have deleted Chessvision from my phone, and only use ChessEye now.

Incidentally, the process of getting a board diagram from a pdf or web page would be much easier if publishers put the FEN under each diagram; then we could just copy and paste that into the chess app of our choice. But oh well.

ty so much for this guide...i was fed up with the rubbish subscription from chessvision...now i only use chessye

regards