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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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