11/18/19
9:00 am

How To Scan Documents With Your iPhone

With iOS 13 it is easy to use your iPhone as a scanner and scan single or multi-page documents. You can scan directly to iCloud Drive and then your documentd would be on your Mac without any additional steps. You can even scan while away from your home or office and they documents will end up in the same place with no extra effort. Your iPhone will flatten the pages and make adjustments automatically.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can scan documents using just your iPhone.
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So I knew my scanner would stop working when I upgraded to macOS Catalina. That's because, unfortunately, the company decided not to upgrade their very old software. So I needed a new solution but I didn't want to buy a new scanner. Well, you can easily scan things with your iPhone. In fact iOS 13 makes this easier than every before especially if you're using iCloud.
In my iPhone I'm going to go to the File app. The Files app is where you can see all of your iCloud files. So the great thing about this is that I see the same files on my Mac as I do here on my iPhone. So I can scan something in. It'll go to my iCloud Documents folder and then I have it on my Mac. I don't have to transfer or do anything else with it later on. I could put it exactly where I want. I could even name the file what I want right here on my iPhone.
So now that I'm in the Files app I go to the folder I want. I created a folder called Scans in my Documents folder. That's where I am now. If I swipe down from the top a little bit I have three dots there at the top left corner. I can select that and you can see one of the options is to Scan Documents. So I do that and it will activate the camera. Now I can position it over the document there. As soon as it gets the document in it will automatically take the photo. It has a button for me to do it manually if it's not quite getting it. But it was able to get it easily enough with this document. It's a nice white piece of paper with a black background here. It grabbed it. So now I just press the Save button and it will save it there right into that folder. If I look on my Mac I'll see that file appear right there on my Mac as well.
Now from here I can easily rename it. I can just tap that document and you can see I can rename it to what I want. So I'll just delete this name here and name it something else and done. Of course I can go to any folder I want in iCloud so I can have all sorts of folders arranging my scanned documents like I want. But what about multiple page documents?
One of the great things about my old scanner is you could feed this stuff in and it would scan it right away. Now doing it this way is not going to beat the speed for a scanner like that. But you could still do it. So I'm going to arrange things here putting the documents in a stack and I'm going to go and scan these in. So I'm going to do the same thing I did before. Tap those three dots there, Scan Documents, and I'm going to grab that first page. When it grabs it, it says ready next scan at the bottom. So now what I could do is take away that first page. I've got the second page underneath it and I can grab that one. So I've got page two. Let's go on to page three. You could do a lot here with angles and such. I can get this kind of at a bad angle if I'm forced to because of my situation. Where I'm standing. How the table is situated. That kind of thing. It's going to make the adjustments. I can keep scanning until I get all the pages of this document. When I'm done with the final page now I'm going to hit Save. You can even see that next to Save is says six there for six pages. Now it saves it here. I've got my scanned document. I could tap it. I could rename it and see it on my Mac.
Let's take a look here on my Mac. If I hit the Spacebar I'll go to QuickLook and you can see that the pages are nice and straight even though I was taking them at angles. As a matter of fact remember that third page I took at a pretty extreme angle. I can pinch out here to go in and you can see the quality is pretty good.
Notice there are some controls here at the top as well. You can choose to have the flash On, Off, or Automatic. You could filter right here before you take the scan. So you can go with Color, Gray Scale, Black and White, or Photo scan. You can also switch the automatic shutter On or Off. Then once you take the scan you have more options. Just tap on the page at the bottom left. Now you can use the Trash Can there to delete the page completely or use the Retake button at the top right. This is very useful when you're doing multiple page documents. You can fix just this one page and not have to start again from scratch.
You'll also have the ability to Crop which goes back to the original photo and you can change the edges of the document so it'll get the adjustments just right when it flattens it. You also have filters there and you can Rotate. The thing I love about this the most is it's completely portable. Wherever I have my iPhone I can do scans. I don't need to be near my Mac. So I can do this on the go. I can scan receipts, for instance, right there at the store. I can sign documents in an office somewhere and scan them right away. I don't have to take a paper copy home to scan it. In a lot of ways this is better than my old scanner even if it's not as fast when scanning large numbers of pages.

Comments: 30 Responses to “How To Scan Documents With Your iPhone”

Fred

5 years ago

Could you please explain to all of us amateurs how you created the scans document folder with all the options you presented in it. Or have you already a video showing how to create that document for cloud drive? Thank you, love your daily video's through YouTube each day.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Fred: It is just a plain folder. I just created a new folder like you would create any new folder. In the Finder on Mac, use File, New Folder. On iOS in the Files app you do it with the same three dots you see when I do a scan (at 1:12, for instance). You can create your folder anywhere you want on iCloud Drive and call it what you want. You don't need to do it the same as me.

Ronald Hecker

5 years ago

Great article. I don't know what scanner you have but Fujitsu did upgrade their software to 64 bit so I can keep using my Scansnap.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Ronald: Not for the ScanSnap S1500M. Official word for this scanner: "No further updates will be provided to the ScanSnap software... please consider purchasing a ScanSnap that is currently available."

frank

5 years ago

Gary, this scanner has overlap (black edges in the video) on the left and bottom edges of the document. The Dropbox and OneDrive app scanners don't overlap the page edges such as the scanner on the Files app does. Thanks for your videos.

Robert Phillips

5 years ago

I scanned a doc into Files and can open it in iOS but it won't open on my Mac mini running Catalina?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Robert: What do you mean by "won't open?" Was there an error message? Perhaps you tried it before the file was fully transferred via iCloud to your Mac?

Robert Phillips

5 years ago

There was a error message and I restarted and reset Pram and it opened, but, it doesn't do OCR on the doc on the Mac at least.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Robert: The OCR is for searching, you won't find the actual text itself anywhere.

Karl

5 years ago

Gary, how do you get rid of the black boarders on the left and the bottom?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Karl: For the most part, you don't. If these are just quick scans to keep a copy of the document for your records, then just let them be. If you really want to get rid of it though, you can use an app like Preview. You can select the area you want to keep in the Markup tools and then use Tools, Crop to hide the area you don't want.

Peter from Perth

5 years ago

Another great video. Many thanks. The only problem I have had with this method is that the scanned documents seem to be much larger files than if scanned with a dedicated scanner. But very handy when out and about.

Ricardo

5 years ago

Fujitsu has repeatedly stated they will not support older 32 bit scanners (ScanSnap 500M for me). I passed the iPhone tip to my iPhone people.

TOM BENSON

5 years ago

outstanding video for scanning documents with iphone!
thanks so much

Vicky

5 years ago

Hi Gary - so useful thank you, and such good timing as I'm sending out a scanned Christmas menu to a group of friends. Not sure though how to email the scan as a pdf attachment. I really appreciate all your videos and your great website! Best wishes from the UK.

Daniela

5 years ago

can you use an iPad to scan instead of an iPhone

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Daniela: Yes. Try it.

Eric

5 years ago

Hi Gary. Another useful tutorial. I don't know what your old scanner is but have you looked at the VueScan app from Hamrick Software (www.hamrick.com)? It runs on Catalina (and earlier releases) and supports many scanners. I have no affiliation to the company other than having been a satisfied user of the app for years.

Eric

5 years ago

Just checked. It looks as though your scanner is supported by VueScan ... https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/fujitsu_scansnap_s1500.html

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Eric: Yes, I know. But $100. Fortunately, I have plenty of old Macs around I can hook it up to if I really need it. That's a better option for me. Still, if I didn't have this iPhone option I'd probably try out that app.

Jim Goddard

5 years ago

Very helpful video.

Mike

5 years ago

Thanks for this Gary. I often want to scan something for my blog and this will help me do it when away from my computer.

Is there a way to save these scans as JPG file? Except for exporting from preview, I'm not sure how to do it in my iPhone.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Mike: Just like on a Mac you'd need to find an app that can convert PDFs to JPEG images. Can't think of one off the top of my head, but there may be something out there.

Peter

5 years ago

Thank you very much Gary! I'm in the same boat as you with my scanning and software updates. I've just scanned an important document, that I have saved and can now throw out - BRILLIANT❗️

Dennis

5 years ago

Scanning is also available from the Notes app. Just select the camera icon at the bottom of a page, and it will open with an option to take a picture or scan.

David

5 years ago

Hi Gary,
Love all you do for us and I am a Patreon supporter. One question...the problem I have when using my iphone 11 to scan is the file size become enormous...each page is 5 to 7 MB even though it's just a PDF. so a few pages become too large to email. is there any built in solution to reduce file size?

thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

David: Thanks! One your Mac, you could always open them up in Preview and then do File, Export and select the Reduce File Size Quartz Filter. When scanning you also have options that I briefly show to use black and while, which may help.

Eric W.

5 years ago

Hi Gary,
The question I have is; I created a file ("Scanz") on my iPhone in the iCloud Documents folder, but am not seeing it being populated on my Mac through iCloud. On the contrary, I tried creating a similar file ("Scanz2") on my Mac>iCloud>Documents and it immediately populated on my iPhone. With that being said, I tried scanning a doc (3.4 MB in size) into that Scanz2 file which worked, however, it still has not populated on my Mac's Scanz2 folder. Thoughts?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Eric: Hard to say what could be wrong. Try the usual things: restarts, maybe logging out and back in.

Eric W.

5 years ago

Gary: Thank you, that actually worked. Anyone having the same issue with iCloud folders not syncing between your devices, try logging out of your Mac's user account and then log back in (not iCloud, but AppleLogo>Log Out *name*>Log back in). Not sure what the bug was, but after doing this my folders were in sync instantly as well as any scanned documents within them. I originally thought it was due to the scanned document size not loading quickly, but that was not the case.

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How To Scan Documents With Your iPhone

Comments: 30 Responses to “How To Scan Documents With Your iPhone”

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