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Scanner AI vision is an AI-enhanced path for recipe pages that do not contain reliable selectable text. Instead of asking local OCR to recognize every character first, Viandly can send normalized page images to the AI provider you configured. The model examines the page as a document, finds the recipe, reads it in context, and creates a structured import draft.

AI vision is optional. Viandly does not send scanner page images to an AI provider until you select Analyze with AI or explicitly enable Automatically analyze with AI under Scanner Imports settings.

When Viandly recommends AI vision

Open a scanner delivery from Inbox. Viandly recommends the least disruptive useful path:

• Continue with embedded text when a PDF already contains adequate searchable text;
• Analyze with AI when text is absent or weak and your selected model has verified image input;
• Review with local OCR when no image-capable model is configured.

You can select Use local OCR instead even when AI vision is recommended. Local OCR keeps page recognition in your browser and is useful when you want to select exact regions yourself.

Automatic analysis

Under Account Settings - Scanner Imports, you can choose whether new deliveries wait for your review or enter AI analysis automatically. Manual review is the default.

Automatic analysis uses the same provider, extraction rules, resource limits, retained source evidence, and draft-review screen as the Analyze with AI button. It is useful for a scan-to-email workflow where you want to feed several recipes through the scanner and review completed drafts later. Waiting deliveries show Enqueued; only work currently held by a worker shows In progress.

Changing the setting does not cancel work that is already queued. If the provider was removed, the model's verified image capability changed, scanner access was revoked, or account import capacity is unavailable when the handoff occurs, Viandly leaves the delivery ready for manual review.

What happens after Analyze with AI

1. Viandly queues the delivery for private background processing. You may leave the page. Enqueued means the scan is safely waiting for worker capacity. In progress means its AI analysis is currently running.
2. PDF pages and images are rotated and normalized into an ordered page set.
3. The page images are sent to the AI provider and model named on the scanner review screen.
4. The model looks for recipe-shaped content, reconstructs reading order, and separates the recipe from advertisements, page furniture, captions, and unrelated editorial text.
5. The model transcribes useful source evidence and maps the recipe into Viandly fields, including metadata, ingredient and instruction sections, quantities, units, preparation, and notes.
6. A private draft appears in Inbox for normal human review. If the page was transcribed but the proposed draft could not be validated, editable recovered text appears instead.

The AI does not depend on the scanner's email subject or filename to understand the recipe. Generic values such as Scan attached or a date-stamped scan_20260722_143015.pdf are expected; the model examines the actual page images. Until that analysis completes, Viandly can identify the item only as a delivery with an arrival time and one or more attachment names. The extracted recipe title appears on the resulting draft.

The analysis is designed for full recipe pages, multi-column magazine layouts, recipes continued across pages, missing section headings, and useful title, attribution, or description text near the recipe. It is instructed to preserve uncertainty rather than invent illegible quantities or other critical facts.

Prepare a useful scan

The most useful general-purpose scanner profile is a searchable PDF at 300 dpi in grayscale. That combination preserves page images for AI vision while also providing a text layer that Viandly can use directly when the scanner's OCR is accurate.

Resolution

• Use 300 dpi for ordinary printed recipes.
• Try 400 dpi for small type, faint print, fractions, or degraded paper.
• Higher resolutions usually create larger attachments without recovering detail that was not present on the page. Keep each attachment within the limit shown in Scanner Imports settings.

Color mode

• Use grayscale for normal black text on white or lightly aged paper. It retains useful edge and shading detail while producing smaller files than color.
• Use color when colored text, highlighted notes, photographs behind text, colored backgrounds, or handwritten color annotations matter.
• Avoid aggressive black-and-white/monochrome thresholding for faint print, thin fractions, stained pages, or colored backgrounds. It can permanently erase character detail before either OCR or AI sees the page.

OCR and searchable PDF

Enable the scanner's searchable PDF, OCR, or text PDF option when it preserves the original page image and adds a selectable text layer. Viandly first checks that text with a PDF-to-text extraction path. Good embedded text is faster, cheaper, and more exact than visual recognition, so Viandly recommends Continue with embedded text when its quality is adequate. Some network scanners can create searchable PDFs only through desktop vendor software; the standalone scan-to-email appliance may produce image-only PDFs. That is expected. Use AI vision or local OCR rather than routing every scan through a desktop solely to add a text layer.

Scanner OCR does not prevent later AI analysis. If the text layer is absent or poor, Viandly can still render the original PDF pages and offer Analyze with AI. Avoid scanner modes that replace the page with reconstructed text or discard the original visual page, because any OCR mistake then becomes the only evidence available.

PDF or image files

• Prefer PDF for recipes spanning multiple pages, duplex scans, or any scanner workflow that can produce searchable text. One PDF preserves page order and keeps the delivery together.
• JPEG works well for a single color or grayscale page when saved at high quality. Avoid strong compression, which can blur punctuation and fractions.
• PNG and TIFF preserve text edges well and are useful for individual pages, but they are often much larger than a suitable PDF or high-quality JPEG.
• Send pages in reading order. A delivery may contain several independent recipes, although smaller coherent page sets remain easier to verify.

Page handling

• Enable automatic rotation and deskew when the scanner performs them reliably.
• Use duplex scanning for a recipe printed on both sides, then verify that blank-page removal did not remove a lightly printed page.
• Check automatic cropping carefully. Clipped margins can remove quantities, section labels, attribution, or text at the edge of a column.
• Include the full recipe and nearby title, attribution, description, yield, time, and notes.
• Avoid heavy shadows, glare, fingers, and page curvature over important text.

AI can often ignore surrounding page material, so you normally do not need to crop a clean full-page scan into individual columns. A closer or cleaner scan is still better than asking the model to recover characters that are not present in the image.

Privacy and provider cost

Scanner files are private temporary intake data in Viandly. When you select Analyze with AI, the normalized page images and the extraction instructions are sent to the AI service account you connected under Account Settings - AI Provider. That provider processes the images under your agreement with it and bills your account for the request. Viandly does not resell the model usage.

Viandly retains the scanner source if analysis fails, so you can retry or use local OCR. When the model returns useful transcription but cannot construct a valid draft, Viandly preserves that text in Source Review and retains the original pages until their normal scanner expiry. After a successful conversion, the original pages remain available beside Source Review and Draft Review so you can check the interpretation against the scan. When one delivery creates several drafts, the pages remain available until every draft has been saved or discarded. Viandly also schedules those temporary objects for removal when you discard the source or reach the scanner retention deadline. The source transcription and drafts follow the normal import lifecycle.

If analysis fails or misses the recipe

Reopen the delivery from Inbox when the provider request or transcription failed. Retry when the failure appears temporary, or select Use local OCR instead to rotate pages, choose regions, control reading order, and correct recognized text before draft creation.

Use View scanned page before choosing a recovery path. The retained page viewer is available on scanner delivery review even when automatic AI analysis is disabled, and it remains available on a scanner-backed failed draft while the temporary source has not expired. When a provider returned malformed JSON, the failure may also show a short response excerpt near the parsing error. That excerpt can explain a truncated or structurally broken response, but it is diagnostic text rather than recipe data to paste blindly into the draft. Viandly intentionally does not retain the complete provider response. Use the Viandly viewer toolbar's previous-page and next-page controls for a multi-page PDF. The page fits the current viewer width, and the zoom controls allow closer inspection.

During successful draft review, use the Source Text and Original Scan tabs in the source panel. The panel appears beside the recipe fields on a wide screen and below them on a tablet or phone. Select Original Scan, then use its expand control when you need a full-page view. Failure and recovery screens show the fuller retained-file panel because no draft source panel is available there.

When AI successfully read the pages but could not validate its proposed draft, Inbox shows a Needs review source item instead of losing the transcription. Open it to:

• correct the recovered text and select Analyze corrected text, which runs the less expensive text-to-draft stage without sending the page images again;
• select Create manual draft to use Viandly's non-AI parser and continue editing manually; or
• select Reanalyze original scan only when the transcription itself is wrong and the retained scanner pages have not expired.

For repeated AI failures, verify Image input under Account Settings - AI Provider, check the provider account's quota or billing, and confirm that the complete recipe is legible in the source pages. See Troubleshoot import problems for additional recovery steps.