Your IPhone Has a Powerful Document Scanner Hidden Inside.
I regularly use my iPhone to scan paper documents, such as medical certificates, ID cards, bank forms, and so on. I’ve been using the Scanner Pro app for this purpose since around 2015. It works well enough, but the best features require a subscription, and it’s no longer as fast as I’d like. I’ve known about Apple’s built-in scanner in the Notes app for a while, but it’s not as user-friendly as the app I used before, so I never switched.
That changed when I recently discovered another built-in scanner on the iPhone, hidden, oddly enough, in the Preview app. This scanner is fast, free, and well integrated with the Files app, which is a big plus. Here’s why you should consider using it.
There’s a hidden document scanner in the Preview app on your iPhone.
Your iPhone comes with the Preview app, which was added with the release of iOS 26 in 2025. Now, when you open a document in the Files app, your iPhone automatically switches to Preview and loads it. However, if you open Preview directly, you’ll see a “Scan Documents” button in the very center of the screen. I’ve been using iOS 26 since the developer betas, but I only noticed this feature after the recent release of iOS 27 betas .
When you tap “Scan Documents” in the Preview app, your iPhone opens the viewfinder, allowing you to point the device at the documents you want to scan. Like Scanner Pro, the scanner in Preview automatically detects the document’s boundaries, takes a photo to scan, and then reopens the viewfinder so you can point the camera at the next page; scanning is also fast. Continue this process until you’re finished scanning, at which point you can tap the checkmark button in the upper-right corner. The scanned PDF will automatically be saved to your iCloud Drive folder, without the need to export. I found this process to be really quick and intuitive enough to recommend to my family members who resist any technology that requires installing a new app or pressing more than two buttons.
When the scanner is open, you’ll see four buttons at the bottom of the screen. The large shutter button allows you to manually take photos for scanning, while the other three allow you to turn on the flash, set color filters, and enable the automatic shutter function. The automatic shutter is the best feature of this app, as it automatically scans the page as soon as it detects edges, but it’s not perfect. If you want more precise control over the scanning process, you can disable it and control the shutter manually.
Why Preview’s scanner is so much better than Apple Notes’
I don’t like working with PDFs in Apple Notes, and this is the best argument for using the scanner in Preview, which immediately saves these documents to the Files app. First, it’s much harder to find and use the scanner in Notes: you have to open a note, click the paperclip icon, and select the document scanner from the menu. The result is saved in the same note, and I find it inconvenient to work with PDFs from the Notes app, which is best suited for viewing text-only notes.
Now I only use the Notes app for scanning documents when I specifically need to save a file to the Notes app. But, with the exception of the occasional recipe that I might scan for storage in the app, I don’t think I’ll use the scanner from within Notes again. In most cases, the scanner in Preview does a much better job.
Another third-party scanning app worth considering.
If you need additional features beyond Apple’s document scanner, there are third-party apps that may be a better fit. Besides the aforementioned Scanner Pro, Adobe Scan excels at scanning and OCR, and offers a generous free plan. The free plan includes unlimited scans, 2GB of Adobe Document cloud storage, and OCR for documents up to 25 pages.
The premium plan costs $10 per month and adds a variety of PDF editing features, such as merging PDFs, extracting individual pages from a scanned document, and editing text in PDFs. You also get the ability to use OCR to scan up to 100 pages per document, up to 20 GB of cloud storage, and a tool called Magic Eraser that can automatically erase your fingers or thumb from scanned pages. I think the free plan is sufficient for most users, but the most annoying thing about Adobe Scan is that even the free plan requires account registration. You can sign in with your Apple, Google, or Facebook accounts to speed things up, but it’s still an unnecessary step for those who just want the app to start scanning right out of the box.