How to scan an organic chemistry problem and get the mechanism
Photograph one question at a time, square to the page, in even light with no shadow from your own hand, then crop to just that question — including the reagents above and below the arrow, and excluding neighbouring problems. Skeletal structures need the crop to contain every bond and label; a cropped-off substituent changes the molecule.
Why typing an organic chemistry problem is so painful
Most subjects survive a keyboard. Organic chemistry does not. A skeletal structure is a picture whose meaning lives in geometry — which carbon carries which group, whether a wedge points at you, where a ring fuses. Writing "the bicyclic compound with the OH on the bridgehead carbon and a methyl at C-4" is slower than drawing it and less reliable than photographing it.
Reaction schemes are worse, because the reagents sit above and below an arrow and their arrangement is meaningful. "1. LiAlH₄ 2. H₃O⁺" is a sequence, and writing it as "LiAlH4, H3O+" quietly turns two steps into one flask — which is a different reaction with a different product.
So photograph it. But photograph it properly, because a bad photo of a structure is worse than a good description.
Taking a photo the app can actually read
- One question per photo. A whole page of problems gives the solver no way to know which one you mean, and it may answer the wrong one.
- Shoot square to the page. Hold the phone parallel to the paper rather than leaning over it. A skewed photo distorts bond angles and can turn a wedge into a plain line.
- Watch your own shadow. The most common bad photo is one where your head blocks the light. Move so the light comes over your shoulder, or lift the page toward a window.
- Fill the frame. Get close enough that the structure occupies most of the picture. Subscripts and stereochemistry markers are small, and detail lost at capture cannot be recovered.
- Avoid glare on glossy paper. Textbook pages reflect. Tilt the page a few degrees rather than angling the camera, which would reintroduce skew.
- Include the whole question. The instruction line matters. "Draw the mechanism" and "give the major product" want different answers about the same reaction.
What to include in the crop
After the shot, the app shows a crop step before anything is sent. Use it.
- Include: the full structure with every substituent and charge, everything written above and below the reaction arrow, stereochemical wedges and dashes, and the wording of the question.
- Exclude: the question either side of yours, page headers, your own working, and any answer already written in the margin — a visible wrong answer can mislead the read.
Crop tightly, but never through a bond. A cropped-off methyl group makes a different molecule and gives a confidently wrong answer. When in doubt, leave a little margin.
Handwritten problems
Handwriting works, with caveats. Print rather than joining letters, keep subscripts clearly below the line, and leave space around each structure — bonds that touch a neighbouring letter are ambiguous. Pencil photographs badly at low contrast; if a structure is faintly drawn, trace over it in pen before shooting.
The characters that cause most trouble are the ones that are ambiguous even to a human reader: a handwritten "Cl" that looks like "U", a "1" that looks like a bond, a benzene circle drawn so small it reads as a dot. If the structure is genuinely messy, redraw it once, neatly, rather than photographing it three times.
When typing is the better tool
Scanning is not always the right answer. Type instead when:
- The molecule has a common name you can just write — "cyclohexanone", "benzaldehyde", "2-bromobutane".
- You want to ask a conceptual question rather than solve a specific structure.
- The printed question contains extra context you would rather leave out.
- You want to add a topic hint. Typed problems take an optional hint — substitution, elimination, addition or aromatics — which tells the solver which family you believe you are in.
A useful hybrid: photograph the structure, then use the tutor to ask a follow-up in words about the step you did not follow.
What happens to your photo
The image is sent once so the model can read the question, and it is not stored on a server afterwards. Your solve history stays on your device, and there is no account to create. If you would rather not photograph a page at all, typing works for everything except drawn structures.
Getting more out of the answer
A scan is the fastest route to a worked solution, but the solution is not the point — the reasoning is. Read the steps in order, cover them, and redo the problem from the structure. Every solve is saved to a searchable history, so the night before an exam you can go back through the problems that gave you trouble rather than hunting for them again.
How Organic Chemistry AI helps here
Scanning is built around this workflow: camera or photo library, a crop step you control, then a solve that names the reaction type and explains each step. Nothing is sent before you have cropped, and the app works the same way on a printed textbook page, a problem set PDF on a laptop screen, and a handwritten worksheet.
Scan from the camera or the photo library, or type the problem instead — both land in the same step-by-step solver.
Frequently asked
Can it read handwritten organic chemistry?
Usually, if the handwriting is clear and well lit. Print rather than join letters, keep subscripts below the line, leave space around each structure, and use pen rather than faint pencil. If a structure is genuinely messy, redrawing it neatly once is faster than reshooting it repeatedly.
Can I scan a whole problem set at once?
Scan one question at a time. A page of problems gives the solver no way to know which one you mean. Crop to a single question, including the instruction line and everything written around the reaction arrow.
Is my photo stored anywhere?
The image is sent once so the model can read the question and is not kept on a server afterwards. Your solve history stays on your device, and the app has no account and no sign-up.
Photograph your next problem
Point, crop, and read the mechanism — printed pages, problem sets and handwriting all work.
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