Verified against Gemini · 2026-02-16
Turn a photo of a whiteboard brainstorm into an organized action plan
A multimodal prompt that reads the handwriting, arrows, and groupings in a photographed whiteboard and turns the visual structure — not just the words — into an organized, de-duplicated action plan.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Look at the photo I've attached of a 45-minute product roadmap brainstorm with the design and eng leads. Read the actual spatial layout, not just the words — arrows, circles, groupings, and crossed-out items all carry meaning; don't flatten them into a random list. INSTRUCTIONS 1. Transcribe everything legible first, noting anything you genuinely can't read as [illegible] rather than guessing a plausible-sounding word. 2. Reconstruct the groupings the way they're actually drawn on the board (circled clusters, boxes, arrows between items) — tell me what connects to what. 3. Treat anything crossed out or struck through as rejected, not as a live idea — list it separately under "Discarded." 4. Merge near-duplicate ideas written in different handwriting or different spots into one item, but tell me when you merged something. 5. Turn the surviving ideas into an action plan grouped by: this quarter vs. next quarter vs. someday. Each action gets an owner placeholder and a rough priority (high / medium / low). Context that isn't visible on the board but matters here: we already committed to shipping the mobile redesign this quarter, so anything competing with that engineering time should be flagged
Customize the highlighted detailsoptional — the prompt above already works
Why this works
Gemini's multimodal image encoder reads spatial relationships directly from the pixels — what's circled, what an arrow connects, what's boxed together — rather than running OCR and discarding the layout, which is why the prompt explicitly demands the groupings be reconstructed 'the way they're drawn' instead of flattened into a list; a plain OCR-then-summarize approach loses exactly this structure. The [illegible] instruction targets a specific and common failure with handwriting photos: a blurry or ambiguous word gets confidently transcribed as the closest plausible-sounding word rather than flagged, which quietly corrupts an action item. Requiring crossed-out items to be filed as 'Discarded' rather than dropped or treated as live prevents rejected ideas from silently resurfacing in the final plan.
Verified against
Gemini Gemini 3 Pro · 2026-02-16
Changelog
- 2026-02-16 — Initial publish, verified against Gemini 3 Pro on a photographed whiteboard session.
Need this built into your business?
If a prompt isn't enough — what Scult builds, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
EXPLORE WHAT SCULT BUILDS
