Protect your COVID vaccination card digitally by creating a good image using a camera or scanner, and keeping it secure in cloud storage.
On April 19, everyone in the United States aged 16 and older becomes eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine appointment. After you get jabbed, you’ll receive a comically old-school 3-inch by 4-inch paper card as proof of your immunization status. You can protect that piece of cardstock by sticking it into an inexpensive badge holder* (Amazon sells a pack of 10 with a resealable zipper for $10), but that doesn’t ward off the possibility of misplacing or outright losing it. To achieve that, here’s what you should (and shouldn’t!) do. Smartphone photos work perfectly fine for digitizing your vaccination card. To get a good snap, take it in a well-lit area on a flat surface, preferably set against a plain, dark background. (It will make it easier to get a clean crop without cutting off too much of the edges.) Your phone’s default camera app will work fine for taking the photograph, but to get automatic cropping, lens distortion correction, plus color and exposure correction, download and use a dedicated scanning app. Scanning apps provide the added advantage of saving files as PDFs as well. We like Adobe Scan (Android, iOS; login required) or Evernote Scannable (iOS). You may, of course also take photos with a camera or a scanner, for greater control over how the file is stored.
