How to turn iPhone into an image scanner in iOS 15? Here you”ll understand how you can make your iPhone into an image scanner. As Apple wants its users to be able to scan documents with their iPhone and provides all the users with very good tools for doing so. However, there are more and, sometimes much better alternatives.
You do already have a document scanner on your iPhone. So, you can take a normal photograph of a page even without using Apple’s newer tools or features, there is nothing to stop you. There’s nothing stopping you from doing so, except that it’s substantially harder to hold the device steady over a document, all while not casting a shadow.
If you do this the scans go into your Photos camera roll. You can see them on your iPhone, iPad, or on your Mac, too.
You can later select any images from your iPhone’s Photo app to send them to Preview. It’s been turned from an image of text, into something you can search, select, as well as copy.
Similarly, you have the ability to send photos to just about any iOS app. Apple Notes, for instance, will take them all in one go, however, it will create a note that has each image stored separately.
How to roll your own image scanner in IOS 15?
You can do huge amounts using Shortcuts. This is even more useful now with macOS Monterey since Shortcuts are on Mac and iOS.
What this particular one does, though, is it turns the various stages of scanning and saving into convenient one-tap Shortcut workflows. It does not improve the quality of a scan, and it doesn’t do anything for coping with the problems you will be facing when scanning whole documents.
So, adding Shortcuts into the mix makes it handier than just plainly using the regular Photos app, but not by a great deal. As a result, it is recommended to be used for no more than four pages of documents at a time which will fulfill most casual document scanning needs.
What is Apple’s solution?
Do you have a document that’s longer than a few pages?
You can utilize Continuity Camera. This is the feature built into Macs where a scan you take on your iPhone will be immediately relayed to that computer. This can be automatically saved into Apple Note, into Pages, or into any folder on the Mac.
What’s more, Continuity Camera will do its best to figure out what’s your document, and what’s your desk. The scanning app will search for the edges of your page, it will also straighten out the scan.
Though it performs these functions, you shouldn’t put this to too much of a test. You indeed have the ability to scan a document using the Continuity Camera, even if the document is at an angle. Or if you are not holding the iPhone at a proper level over it.
The straightening out of the scans is tough to beat. However, the Continuity Camera can also stop working after a few scans in a session. There is also a possibility of it even losing the images you’ve taken up to then.
So, this opens up a small dedicated window for a third-party scanning app. That is before you even come close to the task of having to scan thousands of pages.
Can you use Dedicated scanning apps?
If you want to perform larger volume scans from your iPhone, you have to get Adobe Scan. It is free to download and though it offers various in-app purchases, you don’t need any of them for much of the document scanning.
Adobe Scan asks you to hold your iPhone over the document, then it asks you to tap the screen when you are ready. After you tap the screen, it identifies the edges of the document, then takes the scan.
It will then immediately provide the option to select and copy the text.
