How to Quickly Scan Documents on Mac With IPhone
I don’t use my Mac and iPhone together as much as I should; I usually tend to do tasks on one or the other, rather than transfer my work between the two platforms. However, I could change that now when I see how easy it is to launch iPhone document scanning features from my Mac.
It sounds a little boring and niche – and it is – but I imagine a setup in which someone puts their iPhone on a cheap tripod, points it on a table, and shuffles the papers underneath. And instead of fiddling with repeatedly tapping your phone to take a photo of the mentioned documents, which can invariably be pushed around their position, turning on the camera through the Mac makes scanning batch documents like a click.
Thanks of The Verge (and found them TikToker ) for having told me about it breaking. First, make sure your Mac is running macOS Mojave (at least) and your iPhone is running iOS 12 (at least). Both must have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled, and both must be signed with the same Apple ID (obviously).
After that, you will want to open an application that supports the Continuity Camera function, a list of which can be found here . We’ll use Notes as an example for this. In any old note, simply Control + click to open the context menu and select “Scan Documents” on your phone, which should appear at the very bottom of the menu.
When you do, your iPhone will immediately switch to camera mode. If it detects a document, it will automatically scan its contents and ask you if you want to save the photo:
One downside to this little trick is that you have to click on your iPhone to save or cancel the scan of the document. Select the first one and it will automatically appear in whatever Mac app you’ve used – that’s all.
In a perfect world, you could save or delete a photo right from your Mac. And maybe someday such an opportunity will appear. Until then, Continuity Camera is not ideal for scanning documents, but it makes the whole process much more convenient. And this is even more true if you have a bunch of documents that you want to scan in one setup. You will still have to touch your phone a little, but at least the transfer will be much faster than having to upload your pictures to iCloud, wait, upload them to your Mac, and post them to whatever document you’ve been working on. …
To me? I just dump them all into a folder as Continuity Camera also works directly from the Finder. As an added bonus, anything you scan with your iPhone is automatically converted to PDF.