How To Scan Documents On MacOS Using Only Your iOS Device.
It used to be a novelty that you could scan documents using your smartphone. Now it has become so commonplace that people just say yes when a new scanning application comes along. I mean, how can they reinvent the wheel at this stage?
But believe it or not, there is something that takes scanning to the next level of performance. One nice feature of macOS and iOS 12 that is mostly forgotten about is what’s called the Continuity Camera. From here, you can scan anything (or take a photo) with your iOS device and it will automatically appear on your macOS screen.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUC3U9_dMpI?feature=oembed]
Also, don’t forget to watch our YouTube video from our sister site where we share the best iOS scanning apps you can use to quickly scan from your iOS device.
Scanning will appear!
For this to work, you need to check the following on this checklist.
- You need at least macOS Mojave and iOS 12. And that’s most people these days.
- You need both your Mac and iOS devices on the same Wi-Fi network. So turn off this VPN for the time being .
- Both devices must also be signed into the same iCloud account. iCloud is the secret sauce that connects your macOS and iOS devices for scanning.
- As far as I know, Continuity Camera currently only works with Apple products like Pages, TextEdit, Notes, Mail and soon. I’m sure the third party apps will be back on track soon.
How to scan with Continuity Camera
First, open the Apple product you want to scan the image to. In this article, I’ll be using my favorite note-taking app for macOS – TextEdit.
Right-click the document you want to place the image in and select Take Photo or Scan Documents , depending on what you want to do. In this case, I’m going to scan the document.
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A small pop-up window will appear on the screen asking you to scan the document using your iPhone.
If you look at your iPhone screen, you will see the camera app open, ready to scan.
Hover over the document and click the round button at the bottom. Or point to a document and hold it. Eventually, the camera will determine where the document starts and ends, and will automatically take a picture.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you now have several options. You can retry the scan if the first fails. You can edit it using the tools below, or if you’re happy with the result, click Finish. This will transfer the scanned image to the macOS document.
Depending on which macOS program you are using, you may be asked if you want to convert the resulting document to a different format. This is a purely personal choice on your part, but if you see no reason why not, I would just do it.
Conclusion
You can do this for just about anything – receipts, invoices, correspondence – just about anything you need to digitize. With iOS automatically pushing scans to macOS, you get rid of a few steps and save you time.
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