How to Turn iPad Notes into Flashcards: Just Screenshot and Paste

Studying on an iPad, your notes pile up and look great, but review often ends up as flipping through them from page one again. You know that turning the things you need to memorize into flashcards would help, but retyping everything you wrote by hand is a real chore.

The fix is simple: screenshot your notes and paste them straight onto a card. Drawings, arrows, highlights and all, your handwriting becomes the card exactly as it is.

What you need

• An iPad and a note-taking app (GoodNotes, Notability, or any app you can take screenshots of)
• LQuiz open in Safari or Chrome (it runs in the browser with nothing to install, and you can add it to your Home Screen to open it like an app)

Step 1: Put your notes app and LQuiz side by side

Use Split View or place the windows side by side so your notes app is on one side and LQuiz is on the other. How to do this varies a little by iPadOS version, so try tapping the multitasking button at the top of the app. You can make cards while looking at your notes, with no switching back and forth between apps.

Step 2: Capture only the part you need

Capture just the part that belongs on a single card. Select the area with your notes app's lasso (selection) tool and copy it, or take a screenshot, crop it down to what you need, and copy that.

Step 3: Paste it onto a card

In LQuiz, create a flashcard-style question, write the question on the front, and paste your captured image on the back. Besides pasting, you can also drag and drop images in, and you can resize them. Type a short question, or capture the question from your notes and paste that in too.

Making fill-in-the-blank cards

In your notes app, cover the part you want to memorize with a pen or shape, then take a capture, and you have a fill-in-the-blank question. Paste the covered capture on the front and the original capture on the back. This works especially well for things that are hard to put into words, like diagrams, figures and chemical equations.

1. Capture the original notes with the part you want to memorize visible.
2. In your notes app, cover that part with a shape or a thick pen stroke.
3. Capture it again while it's covered.
4. Paste the covered capture on the front and the original on the back.
5. Use undo in your notes app to remove the cover.

How to organize your cards

• One set per subject, one folder per chapter. Create folders inside a set to split it by chapter, and you can study just the folders that are on your exam.
• Make cards the same day you take notes. A habit of picking out what you need to memorize from that day's notes and making a few cards is all it takes.
• Leave the review schedule to LQuiz. While studying, just tap “Know” or “Don't know,” and spaced repetition decides when you'll see each card next.

Notes are for understanding; flashcards are for remembering. Don't copy out the notes you worked so hard on. Turn them into cards as they are and use them to review.