Digitize Your Handwritten Notes with Readwise

A practical workflow for turning handwritten notes into searchable, page-indexed digital knowledge is emerging through Readwise—especially for people who want their paper notes to live alongside their reading highlights. The core idea is that Readwise can scan a photo of a page, let users select the relevant text, and then attach that extracted passage to a specific page number inside a “book” in Readwise. That page-level indexing matters because it makes later retrieval far faster than searching for a vague transcription or a generic OCR dump.

The transcript walks through the process using the Readwise mobile app. Users open the white Readwise app (distinct from the black Reader app), tap “add highlights,” and choose “via photo.” After taking a picture of a page, they use on-screen blue bars to select the text they want saved, then confirm and review the scan. Readwise supports lightweight markup during review—italics, bold, and highlighting—so the extracted notes can retain some structure. The next step assigns metadata: a page number, the target “book,” and optional notes. If the book doesn’t exist yet, users can create a custom one (for example, a “bullet journal”), optionally adding an author field as an extra search term. Once saved, the selected passage appears as a highlight tied to that page number.

From there, Readwise becomes a bridge to a knowledge base in Obsidian. The transcript emphasizes a key limitation that shaped a client’s decision: scanning and highlighting must be done from the Readwise mobile app. For a large batch—around 2,000 index cards—that phone-based workflow was a dealbreaker for that particular person, even though the indexing concept was compelling.

Still, the workflow is shown as usable in smaller batches. Readwise stores the highlights so they can be viewed on mobile and desktop, and it can generate shareable quote images for social media. On the Obsidian side, the Readwise community plugin is the mechanism that syncs highlights into a vault. After installing the plugin and configuring Readwise sync settings (left largely at defaults), users can choose to import all book highlights or only a specific custom book. If notes don’t appear, a manual re-sync can be triggered from the plugin settings.

Once inside Obsidian, the highlights can be linked and transcluded into daily notes and other documents, turning scanned handwritten artifacts into reusable building blocks.

The transcript also compares alternatives considered for the index-card project: Apple Photos OCR for text search, Apple Shortcuts to extract text from photos and paste into Obsidian, and “Actions for Obsidian” (by Carlos Sottman) to send extracted text directly into Obsidian notes. Those options were weighed against the client’s requirements—batching related cards, avoiding manual text selection, and preserving photos as artifacts. Ultimately, Readwise was treated as an interesting indexing solution rather than the final choice for the full 2,000-card conversion, but it remains a strong fit for anyone who wants paper notes to become page-indexed, searchable knowledge alongside reading highlights.