Image occlusion for nursing students — no Anki add-ons required

Updated August 18, 2026

If you've ever covered a diagram's labels with your hand and quizzed yourself, congratulations: you've done image occlusion. It works for the same reason flashcards work — recall beats recognition. Re-reading a labeled diagram feels productive, but your brain is just nodding along at answers it can already see. Hide the label and force yourself to produce it, and now you're actually building the memory you'll need when the exam shows you the same figure with a blank arrow.

For nursing students this isn't a nice-to-have. Anatomy, the drug pathways, the ECG waves, the fetal circulation diagram you will absolutely be tested on — a huge fraction of what you must know arrives as pictures. Text flashcards alone leave that knowledge untested until exam day.

How to occlude well (whatever tool you use)

• One box, one structure. Each hidden label should become its own card, so the scheduler can learn which structures you know and which you don't. Covering five labels in one card means re-drilling four things you know to reach the one you don't.
• Don't shred the figure. If every label on a 20-label diagram is hidden at once, there's no context left to reason from. The useful version hides one thing against the visible rest.
• Occlude what the exam tests, not what the figure has. A professor's flavor image deserves zero cards. High-yield structures first; decorative arrows never.
• Let a real scheduler drive. The point of making these cards is spaced repetition — reviewing each structure right before you'd forget it. Occlusion cards in a folder you "look at sometimes" are just a slower way to re-read.

The classic route: Anki + Image Occlusion Enhanced

For years this was the only real option, and it still works well if you're an Anki person. The honest picture: it's desktop-first (install Anki, install the add-on — occlusion is built into recent Anki versions now, improving this story), you screenshot or import your figure, draw rectangles over the labels in the editor, and it generates one card per box. Powerful, proven, free — and, like most things Anki, it assumes you'll invest time in the tooling before it pays you back. Med students with a semester of Anki habits should absolutely stay put; this workflow is not a reason to migrate anything.

The one-minute route

The friction in the classic route isn't drawing boxes — that part's almost fun. It's everything before: getting each figure out of a lecture PDF, into the tool, one screenshot at a time, for a 30-figure slide deck.

That's the part that can now be automatic. In Crammed (ours — disclosure below), you upload the lecture PDF itself. It finds the figures in the document, filters out the logos and decorative banners, and asks whether you want image cards. For each figure you draw boxes over what you want to hide — each box becomes one card — or skip the figure entirely with one click, because most figures in most lectures deserve exactly zero cards. The cards then study like everything else: on a real FSRS schedule, weakest first, on your phone or laptop, masks sitting exactly where you drew them.

The text cards for the same lecture got written while you were drawing, which is rather the point: one upload, whole lecture handled.

FAQ

Does image occlusion work on a phone?

Studying occlusion cards: yes, anywhere. Making them is where tools differ — Anki's authoring is desktop-first, while Crammed's box editor works with touch on the phone as well as the web.

Is it okay to use my lecture slides' figures?

Making study cards from your own course materials, for your own studying, is what those materials are for. Don't publish or sell decks with a textbook's figures in them — that's the line.

Cloze deletions or occlusion — which should I use?

Both, by content type: cloze for facts that live in sentences ("The SA node is the heart's primary pacemaker"), occlusion for knowledge that lives in space (where the SA node is). Nursing exams test both kinds; your cards should too.