Revolutionize Your Scanning Game: Transform Your iPhone into a Portable Scanner with This Surprising Trick!

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you urgently need to scan a document, but you don’t have a scanner at hand? Well, your iPhone is the solution to your problem!

Thanks to modern technology, almost every device is multitasking, and the iPhone is no exception. Your iPhone is not only a phone but also a camera, music player, and much more!

In this article, we’ll uncover a simple trick that turns your iPhone into a portable scanner that you can use anytime, any day.

Step 1: Find the Camera App

To begin with, open the default camera app on your iPhone. It’s usually located on your home screen or in your app folder if you organized your apps.

Step 2: Use the Document Scanning Feature

Now comes the tricky part.

On your camera app, tap and hold the screen in the space where you intend to scan the document. Stay steady until you notice a yellow box signifying that the document is in focus.

At this point, you’ll notice a yellow dot and text reading “Document” at the bottom of your screen. Tap the text or the dot, and you’ll activate the document scanning feature.

Step 3: Scan the Document

After activating the document scanning feature, point your camera to the page, and your iPhone will detect the document’s edges automatically. It’s essential to only include the relevant parts of the document within the auto-detected frame.

After your iPhone Locates the document’s edges, it carefully stabilizes the captured image and eliminates vibration, motion blur, and glare to generate a high-quality clear image.

Step 4: Save the Document

Lastly, tap “Done” after checking the image to ensure it’s legible and presentable before saving it to your iPhone’s camera library or any cloud storage.

If you wish, you can also add a filter, crop the edges, adjust colors, or even add your signature to the document in the photo editor.

Congratulations, you have scanned a document using your iPhone!

Why Use Your iPhone as a Scanner?

The convenience of being able to use your iPhone as a scanner cannot be overstated. Since your hardware and software are already at your fingertips, you no longer need to experience the hassle of connectivity or portability issues.

It’s now easy to scan, edit, and share documents with your phone instead of waiting to find a traditional scanner or your computer. Yes, you can scan documents anywhere, whether you’re at home, work, or on vacation!

Conclusion

We hope that you find this trick useful and convenient in your scanning needs. Try out the document scanning feature on your iPhone and experience how it revolutionizes your scanning game.

Say goodbye to frustrating connectivity and portability issues when scanning documents. Now you can quickly scan and share documents directly from your iPhone.

Believe it or not, many of you reading this have had a solution in your pocket since 2017. Not only does your iPhone allow you scan, save, and share documents, but it does so for free via a built-in feature of Apple’s own Notes app.  Let’s take a quick look at how fast and easy it is to digitize your documents using nothing more than your iPhone’s Notes app and camera.  Also: How to clear the cache on your iPhone (and why you should)

How to scan documents and images on iPhone

Materials needed: Any iPhone running iOS 11 or later, the document you need to scan

Estimated time: 1-2 minutes

Step 1: Open Notes and create a new Note

Open the Notes app that Apple includes with iOS and tap the New Note button on the bottom-right of your screen (circled in red above). You can also add scans to an existing note, which we’ll cover below. 

Step 2: Open the document-scanning interface

If you created a new note, as mentioned in Step 1, the keyboard will automatically appear. Once it’s on screen, you can tap the camera icon above it, followed by “Scan Documents” (indicated in red above). If you’re adding your scanned document to an existing note instead, simply load that note in question and look for the same camera icon at the bottom of the screen. The process from here is the same: tap the photo icon and then click on “Scan Documents.”

Step 3: Begin scanning

Once you tap “Scan Documents,” the app will load the view from your rear camera and immediately begin looking for documents in its view. If it finds something it believes is a document, it will automatically capture it (making a shutter sound if you’re iPhone’s not in silent mode) and add that image to the “stack” of scanned pages within your note.  The Notes app is capable of compensating for off-angle captures; it will manipulate the captured image to flatten it out using digital processing. The results of this are generally quite good but occasionally incorporate some distortion, especially if detailed images are included in the document. It’s still best to keep your document flat and parallel to your iPhone for best results.

Step 3a (optional): Manual scanning

If you’d rather take manual control of your scanning, you can tap the “Auto” toggle (circled in red in Step 3) to switch to “Manual” mode. In this mode, scans will only take place when you tap the shutter button. Once a scan is captured in “Manual” mode, you’ll also be able to manipulate the bounding box to correctly match the sides and corners of the document. This can be helpful when the “Auto” mode is struggling to correctly find the edges of a document, or when you only need to scan a portion of a larger document. When you’re happy with the bounding box’s placement, tap “Keep Scan” (circled in red on the bottom-right of the screen) to add it to your stack.

Step 4: Save your scanned documents to your note

Once you’re satisfied with your scanned images – and you’ve scanned all of the documents you’d like to include in this note – you can tap the “Save” button on the bottom-right of the display. You’ll notice a number in parentheses (as seen above) within the button. This is the current number of scanned pages, or separate captures, included in your current note. All of these will be saved to the same note when you tap the “Save” button.

Step 5: Name your note

Once you tap “Save,” you’ll be given the opportunity to name your note by typing it into the field indicated in red above. When you’re happy with the name, you can top “Done” in the top-right of the display to save your note. If you choose to skip this step, Notes will attempt to automatically name the note by analyzing any recognizable text included in the document. In the case of the demo document we’ve been using, Notes chose the name “Product Brochure,” based on the headline seen in the document itself. 

Final Step: Edit and share your scans

Once you’ve captured and saved all of the pages you want in a given document, you can edit it in various ways. Options include cropping and rotating images, altering color characteristics, and more. When you’re ready to share your finished document, tap the familiar iOS share button (in the top-right of the image here), and you can transmit your completed scan to the recipient.

However, if you find yourself frequently scanning documents; need high-quality representations of physical imagery (not just text) in digital form; or require high-resolution versions of physical media for use in photo or image manipulation, it might be worth purchasing a dedicated flatbed scanner. You could also consider an all-in-one device that includes a scanner along with a printer and, sometimes, a fax machine.  

Use a high-contrast background: Since most documents are printed on white paper, this means you usually need a black or dark background of some kind, like a black mousepad, a dark wooden desktop, or any other flat surface that can hold your entire document and contrast with the paper being scanned. If you’re scanning something that is, itself, very dark, use a light background instead. Use enough light: This one’s crucial. Like any image captured with your iPhone’s camera, more light is usually better. Turn on a lamp, open a window shade, or even load a bright, white web page on your nearby PC monitor – do whatever it takes to get more light onto the item being scanned.Stay parallel: Notes does a great job of manipulating the finished scan to make it appear as if it originated from a flatbed scanner. This digital processing can compensate for being slightly off angle without being noticeable, but steeper viewpoints sometimes lead to distortion. If possible, hold your iPhone directly parallel with the document being scanned to provide the best results.