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Version: Next (nightly)

Scan something in

Open Cobblr on your phone, tap Scan, and point the camera at something.

  1. A barcode is the fastest. Hold the code in frame and it reads on its own.
  2. No barcode? Take a photo of the thing itself. A ball of yarn, a power tool, a book cover.
  3. A receipt puts a whole shop in at once. Photograph it and every line becomes its own item.

Whatever you scan lands in the Scan Inbox rather than straight in your collection. That is the point: nothing is filed until you say so, and you can scan twenty things standing in a room and sort them out later on the sofa.

What happens to it​

Cobblr looks the thing up and fills in what it can before you touch it: the name, a picture, the brand, and the details that belong to that kind of thing. Yarn gets its weight and fiber, a tin gets a date, a tool gets its model number.

Then you tap once to keep it. That is the whole loop.

  • It suggests where it goes. If the name is enough to tell (a jar of pasta sauce is a pantry thing), it is already sorted when you get there.
  • Nothing is dated or categorized by hand. A receipt carries its own date, and a shelf life comes from what the thing is.
  • You can fix anything it got wrong, and the correction sticks for next time.

When there is no camera​

On a laptop, use Pair phone and scan with your phone into the same workspace. A barcode scanner that types (the wedge kind most shops use) also works: put the cursor in the scan box and pull the trigger.

The camera needs HTTPS​

Browsers refuse camera access on a plain http:// address, so a self-hosted Cobblr needs a certificate before scanning works on a phone at all. This is the single most common reason a new install cannot scan. Self-hosting covers four ways to get one, and the easiest needs no domain.

Next​

  • Fixing a scan when the lookup guessed wrong.
  • Receipts in more depth, including forwarding an emailed order.
  • The scan inbox, the full reference for the inbox itself: what each row's button means and how a session files.
  • Scanning, for the camera, what to point it at, and where a barcode's answer comes from.