Scan Documents Directly To Your Mac Using Your iPhone

If you want to keep a paperless office, you need to be able to scan documents. Previously, you needed a scanner to do this. But today you can use your iPhone to scan documents quickly and easily. With Continuity Camera you can scan directly into your Mac using your iPhone. You need to make sure you have both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled with both devices and that they are using the same Apple ID and latest macOS and iOS.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
Year's ago I switched to a paperless office. I did so by buying a rather expensive scanner that I was able to feed papers into so anything that I received in the mail I was able to scan in and save it digitally. I didn't have to keep paper copies of anything. You can do the same thing now but you don't need to get another scanner. As a matter of fact you can just use your iPhone. It's easier than ever thanks to something called the Continuity Camera.

To use the Continuity Camera you have to be using the most recent versions of everything. So you have to have Mojave on your Mac. You have to have iOS 12 on your iPhone. You want to have Bluetooth enabled on both. You want to have WiFi enabled on both and of course they both need to be using the same Apple ID. Once you do that you can do some really cool things because you can use your iPhone as a camera and a scanner from your Mac.

So for instance, here I am in the Finder and I have a folder that's going to contain all of my scans. Now the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to use my iPhone to take the scans. Here I am on the Finder on my Mac. I can click the Action button here and there is an Import From iPhone or iPad. You can see both my iPhone and my iPad are shown there and I can choose Scan Documents. My iPhone doesn't need to be doing anything at this moment. I just has the screen on. As a matter of fact it can even be locked.

As soon as I hit Scan Document the phone is actually going to jump to a mode where it's using the camera and as soon as the document is aligned underneath the camera it takes the picture automatically. Now that I've gotten that one scan and it's just for that one page I'm going to hit Save. When I do that the document is then going to appear here in the folder I was on, on my Mac. So it goes directly from the iPhone to the Mac. It doesn't actually get stored on the iPhone at all. I can name it because it's already selected. So I like to hit Return now and name it. Just give it a name. Then it's named and I'm done.

If I want to view it, of course, I can hit the spacebar here. Look at QuickLook and I can see the scan there. It's saved as a PDF. It's fairly compact. It's just a little over 1M for an entire 8 by 11 scan of a sheet of paper. So it's similar to what I would get with using a regular scanner. But what about a multipage document. Well, you can do that as well.

So I can do the same thing here. I can import and scan documents. You know you can also Control click on a blank part of the Finder window and choose to import there as well. So I'll Scan Documents. My phone switches over and I can capture the first page. Then turn the page over and it gets the second. I don't even have to hit any buttons on my phone or my Mac. Just go from one page to the next. Now that I'm done I hit Save. You can see it says Save For there. Now I've got the scanned document here and you can see it has four pages in it.

So it's easy to scan multiple page documents as well. It's a little bit slower than doing it on my old scanner but actually not too bad considering it didn't cost me anything extra and I'm carrying this with me wherever I go. So if I have a MacBook and my iPhone I can actually do these scans just as easily as if I'm sitting at my desk in my office.

Now you can fine tune things a lot as well. You do that on the interface on the phone. So let's import and this time I'm going to let it capture but when it's done capturing it says ready for the next scan. Instead I'm going to tap on the image on the bottom left. Now I can look at it and view it. I can even zoom in on it to see what I've captured. I can make adjustments. I can hit the three circles there at the bottom and actually adjust things. Adjust how it looks. I can go in and change the cropping. So I can drag the corners to adjust. So if it didn't grab the corners of the page to create the perspective correctly I can adjust that. I can rotate. I can hit a Retake button at the top right or Trash. Then when I'm done I go right back to the screen here where I can capture the next image. There's also the ability to turn the flash on or off or leave it as automatic. I can adjust to greyscale for the initial take as well just by pressing the circle button there at the top or even just pure black and white. Then I can go and change the shutter from auto to manual as well. So there's a lot that you can do here if you want to fine tune the process.

Related Posts:
Make Documents Remember Saved Position On Separate Displays?, Scan and Sign Documents With iOS 11, How Do I Use Continuity Between My MacBook and iPhone?, Storing Local Documents When Using iCloud Drive

Having trouble with Continuity Camera? Check out this page: Use Continuity Camera on your Mac.