What is photo notes?

A photo of a whiteboard, sketch, or physical artifact is a legitimate capture method — and for spatial, visual, or environmental information, it is the superior one.

Example: You're in a workshop. The facilitator has built a complex system diagram across three whiteboards — arrows, clusters, annotations, color-coded zones. You could spend fifteen minutes transcribing it into text. Or you could take three photos in four seconds, preserving every spatial relationship, every arrow direction, every color distinction. The photos capture what text fundamentally cannot: the topology of the idea.

This concept is part of Capture Systems in the How to Think curriculum.