Why does photo notes fail?

The most common reason photo notes fails: A camera roll with 400 unlabeled photos and no way to find anything. Visual capture without minimal metadata becomes a graveyard of context-free images. The photo preserves the visual information perfectly — and becomes useless because you cannot remember why you took it or what it connected to.

The fix: Today, capture three things as photographs that you would normally try to describe in text: a whiteboard, a physical arrangement, a diagram, a book passage with margin notes, or an environment that triggered an idea. For each photo, add one line of text context (date, why it matters, what you were thinking). At the end of the day, review all three. Notice how much information the photos preserved that your text description would have lost.

The underlying principle is straightforward: 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.