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Life & fun · April 3, 2014

Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

Whiteboard Picture Cleaner - Shell one-liner/script to clean up and beautify photos of whiteboards! - whiteboardCleaner.md

Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line launched on April 3, 2014 with 186 votes, #16 of 1,174 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 12 years on.

Visit gist.github.com ↗Alternativestop 1% of April 2014

In plain words

This tool is a command-line script that cleans up and enhances photographs of whiteboards. Using ImageMagick with preset settings, it processes whiteboard images to improve clarity and readability while preserving the essential content. Users input the photo filename and desired output filename, and the script automatically applies filters to remove shadows, adjust contrast, and enhance text visibility. It is designed for anyone who documents whiteboard work through photography and wants cleaner, more professional-looking digital copies of their notes.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

This simple script will take a picture of a whiteboard and use parts of the ImageMagick library with sane defaults to clean it up tremendously. Assuming it's saved as a file named whiteboardClean.sh , the command is ./whiteboardClean.sh {name of input file} {name of file to output to} . I was doing a lot work with whiteboards and I'd been taking pictures of them to document what had been written. I wanted a more clean version of the pictures though, something that captured the essence of what a whiteboard image showed. Eventually I found this excellent guide to cleaning up whiteboard photos using GIMP. However, I found I wanted more automation. So, I spent a few hours yesterday figuring out…from gist.github.com

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