Please note: this feature has been temporarily suspended. 
For more information, get in touch at support@smaply.com


You can quickly digitize pen and paper journey maps with Smaply. You simply take a picture, powerful handwriting recognition (also called OCR, optical character recognition) then recognizes the text and uploads a digital version of your journey map to Smaply. Hence, you save time and effort for manual work and can immediately continue working on your insights in a digital environment, share it with your team or present it to others. 

Here are the steps to go through to import an image:


Take a photo of your workshop wall


Take a photo of your workshop wall. For best results break up a large journey map into a couple of images. Smaply Capture will automatically detect sticky notes in the image.


If your journey is fairly neatly laid out into lanes and steps there will be less rearranging for you to do manually.


Import and select areas of interest


Select the image that you'd like to import.

Image format: maximum size of photo 3.5 MB, format type JPG, PNG

Before continuing, select the areas of the image that should become steps. The areas we have automatically selected will be highlighted. If we haven't managed to understand your image perfectly, you need to manually select and deselect the areas of interest. See the section above about how to make this less onerous.

  • Changing the switch “Text detection mode“ will flip between detecting all text in the image to just the sticky notes

  • Click anywhere to select an area

  • Drag to select multiple items

  • Select and press the delete key or button to remove an areas


Organize lanes and step content

Once you have brought items into Smaply Capture, if you need to you can make changes to each step and organize into the structure that you'd like in Smaply.


A quick way of double-checking the handwriting to text conversion is to scan through the list of steps that show on the right after a photo has been captured (or when 'List of steps' is pressed from the menu bar).

On the canvas you can:

  • change text

  • change note color

  • rearrange steps and lane order

  • add and delete lane steps


Choose lane type and name

As a final step, you will get a preview of what the journey map will look like in the Smaply journey editor.

You can also:

  • select a lane to be a title lane; or
  • give each lane a name


Confirm import and open your journey map

Now you can collaborate with your team on the journey map in the standard Smaply interface.