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Comment by kevinsundar | Hacker News Reader

People also forget that you can use Preview to scan documents from your scanner rather than using whatever shitty software came with yours.

Also, Preview > File > Import from iPhone > Scan Documents gives you a virtual scanner instead of having to install one of those "scanner" apps on your phone. Its built into your iPhone already!

I also use it frequently to change image file types.

You can also make a digital version of your signature from a picture of physical version.

There's just tons of small features that work well.

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If you want to scan a document and have an iphone handy, you can also right click in Finder and "Scan document... from iPhone". It opens a UI on your phone that I've never seen before, and "scans" (photographs) pages of a document.

When you're done the results end up in a new PDF wherever you clicked.

Ah I just added this to my comment as you were typing it up. I've used this feature a lot too. Works well.

Preview has other interactions with iOS and iPadOS, too. If you enter markup mode you can draw all over a PDF with your phone or tablet.

How do you trigger this? I'm not seeing it on Monterey + ios 15.4.

There are some prerequisites like having the same icloud account signed in on both mac and iphone.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204975

That iOS scan feature is "hidden" in the Files app. Open it on your phone and press the three dots in the top right corner and it should have "scan documents" option.

You can also select "black & white" mode for text documents which saves a ton of space

Notes.app also exposes scanning… but often I want to scan to camera roll. They should add a button in Camera.

I only knew about it through notes and thought it was neat but a little clunky... This "Scan from iPhone" feature is great, wish they made it easier to find as I've used MacOS for years and never knew about it.

You can also add Notes to your control center in settings. You can then long press the notes icon in control center and choose “Scan document”.

True, however it seems that you cannot export the scan as-is from the Notes app; the resulting file is padded weirdly for whatever stupid reason. No such ”feature” is forced on the scans via the Files app scan.

There is also the built in Image Capture app that works with most flatbed scanners or printer/scanner combos. It has its own quirks, but works better than any manufacturer software I’ve ever tried.

Agree. Works out of the box with every Epson flatbed scanner I've attached.

Holy hell, I'm glad I clicked on this story. Had no idea this feature existed, I've been using much clunkier solutions to get a photo or document over from my phone. Thanks!

People probably forget that because the Preview UI is extremely minimalist, like it doesn't want to tell you about all its capabilities

> ...rather than using whatever shitty software came with yours.

I just helped a friend setup a Brother all-in-one for use with their newish Lenova Windows 11. Two hours. No way they could have figured this out on their own. So many hoops, glitches. Everything was ... so ... slow.

With Mac & iPhone, printing and scanning Just Work.

Having not used Windows for ages, I can't believe how bad that stack, ecosystem, tech culture remains. Just turrible.

For scanning there's also Image Capture.app which also comes with the OS. I haven't tried using it with the phone though, just a normal printer/scanner.

I like Image Capture.app when I want to scan a multi-page document to one PDF

I've always used the built-in Image Capture app to do tjr scanning, mainly because the app seems to open automatically when I plug in my USB flatbed scanner.

Oh wow, I use iPhone Notes to scan documents when out and about quite often, but I had no idea Preview could connect to it. Thanks!

The Scanner feature is actually PrinterProxy.app, rather than Preview.

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