You can use the smartphone camera to perform a lot of functions and not just take pictures of family members or landscapes. With the right apps, you can get the most out of your camera, such as translating texts, scanning documents, and more.

Here are 6 uses of your smartphone camera that you may not know:

Explore the sky with a phone camera

Many people enjoy staring at the stars on a clear night. But you can make the experience even better by knowing what you’re looking at, and the best app that lets you do that is Star Walk 2, which uses your location and input from your phone’s internal gyroscope to identify constellations, satellites, and other things.

Digitizing paper documents

The phone’s camera allows you to convert paper documents into digital documents. And you can use the Microsoft Lens app. Which allows you to scan photos, printed documents, business cards, or any document that is handwritten or contains text into a digital document. You can also edit and share it, save it to your phone as a PDF, upload it to Word or OneNote, or send it via email.

Searching for information through the phone’s camera

The Google Lens app that comes built into the Google Photos app lets you take a picture of anything and find out information about it. It also allows you to identify the object in the image, whether it is a historical landmark or a work of art, and provides information about it.

Accessing websites

QR codes give you an easy and direct way to access websites. You can scan a QR code through the camera in an advertisement in a magazine in order to access a website with more information about the advertisement or to get a special discount for the product.

Use your phone’s camera as a remote monitor

You can use your old phone’s camera as a security device for remote monitoring. And one of the best apps that you can use is the Manything app that allows you to live stream from anywhere. It can send notifications when it detects motion in front of the camera and save videos to your account via the cloud.

Translation into your native language via the phone’s camera

With the Google Translate app, you can point your phone’s camera at the words you need to translate instantly. Or import an image from your phone to translate the text in it. The app also has a feature to detect the language you want to translate. So far, the application supports 108 languages ​​around the world.