I’m still a Dropbox user, and a small feature I like on their mobile app is the Scan document option. You press the big blue + icon and it’s one of the options there.
It opens the camera, you point it at a document and hold steady, and it takes a scan of the document. Sometimes it’s tricky, you gotta have a contrasting background and not weird lighting and stuff. You can add multiple pages. Then when you’re done, you pick a folder, and it’s uploaded straight there. I’ve used it 100 times at least.
Looks like Evernote has a free one too that looks nice.
I didn’t know a similar feature was built into the Notes app on iOS! Ian Miller has the lowdown.
- Open the Notes app that comes with your iPhone.
- Press the new document icon on the lower right of screen.
- Select the camera icon on the lower toolbar just above the keyboard.
- From the popup menu select Scan Documents.
Thoughts?
Email me or comment below.
Also CodePen PRO is quite a deal. 🙏
iOS also has Scan Documents in Files app. Tap “three-dots-in-the-circle” button at the top of the app, then “Scan Documents”.
My go to app for scanning on iOS is OCR Text Scanner: QuickScan. It sounds like another generic spammy app, but I’ve been using it for a couple years and it’s awesome. Free, no ads, no subscription. It was one of the few that did OCR that wasn’t behind a subscription. I have no affiliation with it, just one of those hidden gem apps.
Furthermore than the Note app, the Files apps have that option too. As a NAS lover, Synology Drive also have this feature, so it’s come very handy to scan some files and directly put it on your self-hosted cloud, ready to be archived
You can scan a document by pressing and holding down anywhere in an empty space in any folder of the Files app. The scanned document will be saved as a PDF in that folder. If the folder is full of documents, you can press next to where the items count of that folder is listed, at the bottom/end of the folder.
Alternatively, you can press the ellipsis-inside-a-circle icon, at the top right corner of the Files app on an iPhone or at the top right corner of the navigation sidebar (on the left side of the screen) on an iPad in landscape orientation.
The Google Drive app has this ability as well, at least on Android
I use Google Drive with this feature on iOS—it’s there too!
A similar feature is built into Finder. If you have Handoff and or AirDrop enabled, your Mac can use your iPhone or iPad to scan a document just like the Notes app.
I like to use the Scanner app Docutain. I prefer a specific scanner app over the notes app, because I get searchable PDFs that I also manage within the app.