It is week six. The slides for one module sit in a folder on your laptop, the handouts for another are still a photo on your phone, and the exam timetable went up yesterday. You already know flashcards would fix this. Making them by hand, module after module, is the part that stops you.
Studyflash is a flashcard maker that works from the material you already have. Upload the PDF, the slide deck or a picture of your notes, and a finished deck comes back, question on one side and answer on the other, in the wording your course actually uses. You read it through and fix whatever came out wrong.
From PDF to flashcards, and what else you can upload
A lecture PDF or slide deck
Handouts, a scanned chapter, a past paper, the slides for the module. Where the file has no text in it, Studyflash reads the page as an image, so a photocopy works too.
A photo of your handwritten notes
Take a picture of the page. Printed capitals come back more reliably than joined-up writing, so read the set through first.
A class you recorded
Record the lecture on your laptop or in the app, and the transcript becomes the source for the cards, a summary and a quiz.
Pasted text
Nothing to upload. Paste a definition list or a set of notes from another app.
Cards you already have
An Anki export comes across, basic and cloze cards both.
What an AI flashcard generator is actually for
Rereading a chapter feels productive and mostly is not. You recognise the sentences, so your head reports that you know them, right up to the exam. A card makes you produce the answer instead, and spaced repetition schedules each card by how well you remembered it, so what you keep missing comes back sooner.
The reason a generator helps is not that writing cards is dull. A card pulled out of your own handout carries your lecturer's definitions and examples; one written from a topic name carries whatever is generally true. Your exam asks for the first kind.
Two ways through a deck, over the term and the night before
Spaced repetition is the mode for the weeks when the exam is still far off. Cram mode ignores the schedule and runs the whole deck in one sitting, for the evening before, and leaves your schedule untouched.
Editing the deck, and taking it with you
Search the deck, filter by what you have not learned yet, rewrite the AI flashcards that came out flat, write your own. If a deck missed the point of the lecture, regenerate it: the cards you wrote yourself stay. Export it to PDF, or share the deck by link so someone in your study group can save a copy. On the phone apps the deck works offline.
Where this earns its place
Anatomy in a first-year medicine course. The content is the labelled figure, so image occlusion hides the labels and asks you to name them.
A law module before an oral exam in Vienna: case names, definitions and dates you have to say out loud, not recognise in a list.
A language certificate like the Goethe or DELF exam, with vocabulary pairs built from your teacher's word lists rather than a stranger's deck.
Two things it does not do
Give it a topic name and nothing else and the cards come back generic, unconnected to what your lecturer emphasised. Upload the handout instead.
A module that is mostly derivations, thermodynamics or econometrics, suits cards poorly in any app. The work is in the steps, so it belongs in a quiz or a conversation with Max, who walks you through the working.
Free to start
The free plan covers flashcards, quizzes and spaced repetition, with a monthly allowance of AI generations, enough to run one of your own uploads through. A free flashcard maker is only worth anything if you can test it on your own material. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.
Questions and answers
iPhone, iPad and Android. Decks you have already generated work offline, and your review progress syncs when you reconnect. Generating anything new does need a connection.
Yes, both Anki packages and plain text exports. Basic and cloze cards come over with their images, cloze becomes fill in the blank, and formatting is stripped while the text stays. Audio does not import.
Turn on the type-answer option and you type your answer, then see it beside the correct one. Worth doing the moment you notice you are recognising cards rather than recalling them.
No. The free plan does not ask for one. Prices for the paid plan are set per country and shown at checkout.
Yes. Setup asks whether you are at school, at university or in an apprenticeship, and exams are graded on your country's scale either way.