How To Use Your iPhone As a Scanner For Your Mac

hi this is Gary with macm most.com let me show you how you can scan documents into your Mac using your [Music] iPhone Macos has brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2,000 supporters go to mmos.com patreon there you could read more about it join us and get exclusive content and course discounts now you may think that in order to scan documents into your Mac that you need a scanner but in fact you can use your iPhone for this I'm not talking about scanning to your iPhone and then transferring over to your Mac I'm talking about using your iPhone as a scanner for the file to go directly to your Mac so for my first example I'm going to scan this two-page document into my Mac using my iPhone and I'm going to do it directly to a file so here I am in the finder and if you select a folder so let's say this examples folder here and I control click on it two finger click on a trackpad right click on a mouse I can see the context menu one of the options you should see here is import from iPhone or iPad and here I've got my iPhone and my iPad listed now the reason these are listed here is because they are using the same Apple ID they are nearby and I've got Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned on for these devices and they should appear automatically there's really nothing for you to do but if you want to dig more into this and what the requirements are check out this this page at Apple site and it shows you which apps support this feature which is called continuity camera and it gives you some step by steps as well as requirements for using it so here in the context menu I'm going to select scan documents I can select take photo just to take a regular photo which is useful in other cases but in this case I'm going to choose scan documents and my iPhone is automatically going to react to that by bringing up this scanning interface and now I can position my I phone to where it gets the full page in and it should automatically take it and then I'm going to go to the next page and it should automatically take that as well but if it doesn't for some reason I can press this button that's here to automatically take it I can also tap here to review the pages here I can just swipe between them and I can retake one I can crop and there's some other tools here as well I can also trash it if it looks okay in the review I can tap done and go back to scanning notice there are also options here like for instance I can turn off auto so I have to use that shutter button there I also can turn on and off the flash if I want and I've got some options here I can set it to color grayscale black and white or photo those are the quality choices there and when I'm done with the scan on my iPhone here I tap save button and it's going to save so here if I look in the folder now I'm going to see where it says scanned document and I can select it and I'll quick look and I'll see the document right there since it is a PDF if I double click on it I can actually open it up and preview or I can work with it some more if I like so for instance I go to the markup tools here and I can mark it up I can use a selection tool here for instance and I can select an area of this page here and then under Tools I can go to crop or command K so I can further adjust things in previous just like I would with any other PDF of course also I can rename it now to something that makes more sense so in addition to the context menu here in the folder there are other ways to get to this functionality for instance if I was in icon view here so I had some Blank Space to click on I could bring up the context menu here and actually save this scan right to this same folder you could also do it inside of apps so for instance here I am in preview instead of creating a new document or opening a document I've got import right here and I can import a scan from the iPhone so I'm going to do it again here and I'm just going to scan this receipt and then I'm going to tap save and you can see here I've got that scan here this is handy because I can now go in and edit it so I go to markup tools here I will crop it here to only what I need and when I save it I could actually save the format as a PDF and you might find under quartz filter the ability to use a reduced file size which will save something smaller or perhaps I can just save it as a JPEG and I can set the resolution here and the quality so notice if I save this I'll just save it to the desktop this saves a pretty small file right here only 46k so if you're looking to save some space and have smaller scans that's one way to do it but you could also scan directly into apps so for instance here I'm in pages and if I SC click right click or two finger click see I can insert a photo or a scan document right here inside of this document here so I'll let it take that photo and then I'll save it and you can see now I've got the image right inside of the pages document I didn't have to save it in an intermediate file first notes is another place where you can easily scan I can go to file and then insert from iPhone or iPad here and I can scan a document right into note or even an email message I'll compose a new message here if I want to scan something and have it go directly into here I can control click right click or two finger click here and I've got the same insert menu to scan a document right into this message without having it be in a file first so of course one of the biggest advantages doing this is you don't have to buy a completely different device like a scanner or replace your printer with a printer scanner combination if you need to scan in occasional documents downsides are it can get unwieldy to do large documents if you've got a 40-page document to get through that's a lot of individual shots to take but even that if you don't need to do it too often it's pretty easy to do it on your iPhone and save the money and space on a scanner another downside is size this technique really doesn't do much to conserve size so if you're worried about that then you definitely want to scan into preview and do things there to uh reduce the size before you save the file whereas a regular scanner may give you options to scan at pretty low resolution in Gray Scout all the time and creates smaller PDFs so hope you found this useful thanks for [Music] watching if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 41,156

Keywords: scan with iphone, scan iphone to mac

Id: unm_PQP5_yg

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024