+++ title = “Unlock the Secret to Effortless Mobile Scanning and Faxing with Your iPhone - All You Need to Know!” description = “Learn how to make the most of your iPhone’s scanning and faxing capabilities and eliminate the need for a dedicated scanner or fax machine.” date = “2021-09-10” tags = [“iPhone”, “scanning”, “faxing”, “mobile”, “productivity”]

[author] name = “Your Name”

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Are you tired of lugging around a bulky scanner or fax machine just to send important documents? With today’s technology, there’s no need to use outdated equipment. Your iPhone is capable of scanning and faxing with just a few simple steps. In this article, we’ll show you how to unlock the secret to effortless mobile scanning and faxing with your iPhone.

Scanning with Your iPhone

The first step to scanning with your iPhone is to locate the built-in Scanner app. If you can’t find it on your home screen, swipe down from the middle of your screen to access your search bar and type in “Scanner.” This should bring up the app for you to download.

Once downloaded, the Scanner app will guide you through the scanning process. Simply hold your phone over the document you wish to scan and align it with the outline provided in the app. The Scanner app will automatically detect the edges of your document and adjust the image accordingly. You can also manually adjust the corners of the image if needed.

After you’ve captured the perfect image, you can save it to your phone or share it via email or message. You can also choose to convert your scanned image into a PDF or image file if necessary.

Faxing with Your iPhone

Sending a fax through your iPhone may seem daunting, but it’s actually quite simple. There are several apps available on the App Store that offer faxing services, such as FaxFile, MyFax, and eFax. These apps require a small fee, but they are a cost-effective alternative to purchasing a dedicated fax machine.

To send a fax with one of these apps, simply select the document you wish to fax from your phone’s storage, and the app will guide you through the rest of the process. Be sure to input the correct phone number and double-check the details before sending. These apps will also send a confirmation message once the fax has been delivered.

Tips for Effortless Mobile Scanning and Faxing

To make the most out of your mobile scanning and faxing capabilities, here are a few tips:

  • Clean your phone’s camera lens before scanning to ensure a clear image.
  • Use a dark background when scanning to make the document stand out.
  • Avoid using a flash, as it can create glare and distort the image.
  • Double-check all fax details before sending to prevent errors.
  • Save important documents to a cloud-based storage service, such as iCloud or Google Drive, for easy access on all of your devices.

In conclusion, your iPhone can do more than just make phone calls and send messages. With its built-in Scanner app and available faxing apps, you can eliminate the need for a dedicated scanner or fax machine. Keep these tips in mind and start enjoying the convenience of mobile scanning and faxing today!

I don’t enjoy those days. But, thankfully, I have a set of tools that makes the process manageable. I’m talking about scanning and faxing from your iPhone. Scanning is probably the one you’re most familiar with. Your iPhone has a camera. You take pictures of just about everything with it. So, scanning a document is a natural extension of the taking pictures of everything thing. But faxing? Seriously. Does anyone fax anymore? Yeah, they do. I’ll give you one example from when I was handling some really tough family stuff. My dad (who has since passed away) was in the hospital. The care team needed some medical records right away for urgent care, but the medical records office at the facility my dad had been transferred from was closed for the night. As it turned out, I had copies of those documents stored in my Evernote. The hospital didn’t have a printer I could access. But they did have a fax machine. So, I pulled the document out of Evernote and faxed it – all from my phone – to the hospital’s fax machine. The important document was in the doctor’s hands in five minutes, instead of sometime the next day when it well might have been too late. Over the time I was caregiving for my parents, I had to pull the fax-documents-from-my-phone trick numerous times. I also needed to transfer documents while on the road traveling. There were times all I had was my iPhone, and I needed access to my entire document library. I talked earlier about how the cloud helped me in these circumstances, but a critical piece of the puzzle has always been the scanning and faxing capabilities of my phone.

How to scan from your iPhone

As with everything on the iPhone, if there’s one app in a category, there are fifty. Rather than run down all the possible apps you might use, I’m going to just showcase three apps that I use for scanning and faxing. Scannable, a free app provided by Evernote, is my first go-to. Scannable is smart in how it grabs documents. It easily finds the natural edges of a page. You can capture a bunch of pages in a row, and either upload them to Evernote or send them to another application. I like how Scannable lets you turn a flashlight on and off to get better images in less-than-ideal environments. It also de-warps documents (at least a bit), so if you take a picture of a document from an off-angle, Scannable does its best to square up the corners and present a clean image. As useful as Scannable is, it doesn’t help with one problem: glare. Have you ever tried to take a picture of another picture and had glare from a ceiling light obscure some of what you were trying to capture? It’s a paradox of capturing glossy images. If you get enough light on the object to get a good shot, you’re going to get some glare. PhotoScan, from Google, helps me get around this problem. PhotoScan is available for both iOS and Android. You use it by holding the phone over a photo you want to scan. PhotoScan will present four white dots. You need to angle or move the phone to make sure a targeting pointer is inside each of those dots. As you do, PhotoScan grabs images of the photo you’re scanning, from slightly different angles. By doing this, the program gets different views of the photo being scanned. This allows it to stitch together all the views and angles, building a composite image that does not have the glare in the final picture.

How to fax from your iPhone

eFax is my go-to service for faxing from my iPhone. This service isn’t cheap, with plans starting at $16.95 a month. The benefit of eFax is you get (or can port) a fax number, so you can both send and receive faxes. There’s also a cloud interface that stores your faxes. In my case, this allows me to give out a fax number so that I can get critical documents from organizations that are stuck in the 1990s. What I like about eFax is that it includes a share extension, so I can fax from almost all iOS apps that support sharing. This makes it easy to fax a document from almost all of my apps. I know some of you looked at that $17/mo fee and shook your head with a big, “no-no, uh-uh, I’m not paying no two hundred bucks a year to fax stuff” grumble. I agree. It’s rough. If it wasn’t something I use relatively regularly for both work-related communication and family management, and had years of faxes stored in their online library, I wouldn’t either. iFax is a substantially less expensive but reliable alternative. The base iFax plan costs about 30% less than eFax and includes 25% more faxes per month. The Pro iFax tier supports more than double the number of pages as eFax’s Pro plan, for about the same price. eFax has a few more features, but iFax’s interface is a little cleaner. Fax Burner is a somewhat wackier alternative that allows you to send and receive a few pages at no charge. It has in-app purchases that let you buy more pages, but if you just need to send a couple of pages once or twice a year, Fax Burner is a decent alternative. I haven’t personally used the service. I’m always a bit wary of sending confidential information through a free service, but for those of you who need to fax and don’t want to sign up for a costly plan, it is an alternative. What apps do you use to scan and fax documents from your phone? Do you still fax at all? Let us know in the TalkBacks below.