Other iPhone's Scanner amazes people, even Android fanboys

[izzy0242mr]

If she had a Galaxy S23, she could do that. Scanning and text extraction is in the camera app and I think they are rolling it out to older models too. Just need to go to the Galaxy Store app and install updates.

I have a 2019 Samsung Galaxy device.

It can do this, too. You open the Camera, aim at a document, it detects it's a document and you tap the scan button. It auto-crops it, and then when you open the scan you just took, it has a little "eye" icon at the top right, which you click to show more details, and one of the options is "text." You can select text right in the app–and of course can share it and all that.

 

[izzy0242mr]

Seriously you'd get more people switching to iPhone if you told them "hey you can use your iPhone as a document scanner wherever you go." That's a big selling point for personal and business use.

My 2019 Galaxy can do this (with OCR and everything). People who say older Samsung phones can't probably just haven't used their phone enough to figure it out!

 

[Kayakphotos]

Never understood why Apple buries some of it's best features.
There is another must turn on feature that is hidden away in the accessibility menu, Three Finger Drag for the Trackpad/Magic Trackpad. It allows you to just rest three fingers on the pad to move any object, moves dials, or to highlight. (Bonus! Once you start with three fingers you can continue the drag with just one). Turning it on also doesn't break any other function.

Three finger drag is way quicker than the double tap to drag, and no accidental opening of a file when trying to move it. Ten time better than the awkward press and hold while dragging. Makes highlighting stuff a dream.
Every friend I've shown this to has used it instead of the default for years now. Some even call me when getting a new Mac to ask where to turn it on is as it's not in the Trackpad options.

System Settings> Accessibility> Pointer Control> Trackpad Options> Dragging Style> Three Finger Drag

See! Buried as F This should be in the standard Trackpad option menu.

*I also remember when the world freaked out after learning hold spacebar to move cursor in iOS which Apple never told anyone.

Thanks for the 3 finger drag. I never realized it was a feature and prefer it

 

[IamTimCook]

Thanks for the 3 finger drag. I never realized it was a feature and prefer it

You’re welcome. And enjoy.

 

[phenste]

always here for your posts Spaceboi

 

[ForkHandles]

Also you used to be able to ask your Mac to open your iPhone for scanning which was very useful. I think they have deprecated that now.
I never did know how to do it natively on iPhone. Thank you guys.

 

[v0lume4]

Yeah.
Hit the browse button in the files app, then the three dots in the top right.
It allows you to save straight into the files app as a PDF

Thanks for telling me this, because I recently discovered the scan feature but was perturbed that the document was stuck inside the Notes app.

 

[Mac47]

Best scanner app I’ve seen for iPhone and iPad is VFlat. It automatically adjusts for the curve in book pages perfectly, and provides OCR to make a searchable PDF with text that can be selected.

 

[Tsepz]

So if you guys know me from some of my other threads I work in a government data center. Everyone is issued an iPhone as a workphone, and hooo boy a lot of employees here don't like that since they're longtime Android fanboys. I keep hearing them complain how much they hate iOS, and even when discussing the benefits of adding Apple Silicon Macs to our organization, I always get told "we only use real computers here."

But there's one instance that has won them over to iPhone and actually wowed them, something I wish Apple talked about more: The built in document scanner in the Notes app. One of the managers had her scanner broken out for service and needed to fax a document, to which I just casually told her "you know your work iPhone has a scanner built in." She went "wait, it does?" I showed her how to do it and when she saw how effortless it was and how good the end result looked, and the fact you could digitally sign documents from the iPhone, she was speechless and her jaw dropped. "My Galaxy doesn't do that."

The next day, she started telling others around the building that I showed her how to scan documents with an iPhone, and more people started coming to my desk asking for me to show them how...then more...then more...and now next week I'm giving a tutorial presentation over Teams how to do it.

Honestly at this point Apple should hire me lmao. I turned the opinions of an entire building of Android fanboys completely around with just one move

Tim Cook may have finally found his successor…

But seriously, that’s cool, iPhone/iOS has a lot of these cool hidden features that Apple barely talk about and many of these features are so damn good and effortless to use once you get to know about them.

 

[Confused-User]

Also you used to be able to ask your Mac to open your iPhone for scanning which was very useful. I think they have deprecated that now.
I never did know how to do it natively on iPhone. Thank you guys.

On the contrary, they're moving it further into the OS. In many apps, and in the Finder, you can right-click to get either an "Import from iPhone" submenu containing the choices "Take Photo", "Scan Documents", and "Add Sketch", or just those three menu choices directly. For example, in the finder, you can get that on the desktop, or in any folder, and then the document appears when you're done. You get the same choices in TextEdit. You don't get them in, say, Terminal, where it wouldn't make sense.

One thing they don't support yet, AFAIK, is to pull text directly from an image on the phone into a document on the Mac. You can of course use builtin features to do that right now, as long as your hardware is new enough to support Apple's OCR, but it involves a few separate steps.

 

[ForkHandles]

On the contrary, they're moving it further into the OS. In many apps, and in the Finder, you can right-click to get either an "Import from iPhone" submenu containing the choices "Take Photo", "Scan Documents", and "Add Sketch", or just those three menu choices directly. For example, in the finder, you can get that on the desktop, or in any folder, and then the document appears when you're done. You get the same choices in TextEdit. You don't get them in, say, Terminal, where it wouldn't make sense.

One thing they don't support yet, AFAIK, is to pull text directly from an image on the phone into a document on the Mac. You can of course use builtin features to do that right now, as long as your hardware is new enough to support Apple's OCR, but it involves a few separate steps.

Youre right. It works again. Perhaps my Mac needed a reboot, or perhaps an update fixed it.

 

[Paddle1]

One feature I feel is pretty hidden is the ability to instantly transform hand drawn scribbles into perfect shapes while drawing on screenshots.

 

[ContentCruiser]

So if you guys know me from some of my other threads I work in a government data center. Everyone is issued an iPhone as a workphone, and hooo boy a lot of employees here don't like that since they're longtime Android fanboys. I keep hearing them complain how much they hate iOS, and even when discussing the benefits of adding Apple Silicon Macs to our organization, I always get told "we only use real computers here."

But there's one instance that has won them over to iPhone and actually wowed them, something I wish Apple talked about more: The built in document scanner in the Notes app. One of the managers had her scanner broken out for service and needed to fax a document, to which I just casually told her "you know your work iPhone has a scanner built in." She went "wait, it does?" I showed her how to do it and when she saw how effortless it was and how good the end result looked, and the fact you could digitally sign documents from the iPhone, she was speechless and her jaw dropped. "My Galaxy doesn't do that."

The next day, she started telling others around the building that I showed her how to scan documents with an iPhone, and more people started coming to my desk asking for me to show them how...then more...then more...and now next week I'm giving a tutorial presentation over Teams how to do it.

Honestly at this point Apple should hire me lmao. I turned the opinions of an entire building of Android fanboys completely around with just one move

I used to save files as PDFs on my (first) iPhone 6s back in 2015 with Apple Books, now just Books.
Take a picture (edit if needed), tap the menu/share icon and slide through apps till you see Books and tap it, it is now saved as PDF in Books.
Open Books, tap Library, tap on Collections and there you’ll see all your PDFs or in Library tap the 3 dots next to the file and you’ll see “Share PDF” in the pop-up menu. When you open the file tap on the image to use Mark-Up.

Never understood why Apple buries some of it's best features.
There is another must turn on feature that is hidden away in the accessibility menu, Three Finger Drag for the Trackpad/Magic Trackpad. It allows you to just rest three fingers on the pad to move any object, moves dials, or to highlight. (Bonus! Once you start with three fingers you can continue the drag with just one). Turning it on also doesn't break any other function.

Three finger drag is way quicker than the double tap to drag, and no accidental opening of a file when trying to move it. Ten time better than the awkward press and hold while dragging. Makes highlighting stuff a dream.
Every friend I've shown this to has used it instead of the default for years now. Some even call me when getting a new Mac to ask where to turn it on is as it's not in the Trackpad options.

System Settings> Accessibility> Pointer Control> Trackpad Options> Dragging Style> Three Finger Drag

See! Buried as F This should be in the standard Trackpad option menu.

*I also remember when the world freaked out after learning hold spacebar to move cursor in iOS which Apple never told anyone.

Thank you, it is so much better, love it.

Yes, quite a lot is hidden in Settings > Accessibility that shouldn’t be hidden there in the first place.

 

[orbital~debris]

Love scanning in documents with my iPhone. Do it all the time. Scan in important stuff, shred it. Write out thoughts on paper? Scan it in, shred it. lol. One of the heavily used areas on my iPhone.

Ever since iOS/iPadOS, macOS became so good at finding content inside documents, this became my ethos on document management.

I mostly use a Doxie scanner (I like the visual method of processing, stapling scans), supplemented by Notes’ scanning feature.

Does anyone know if the OCR performed on scans is using the same underlying software whichever way you scan?
I should do some comparisons – Notes could turn out to be a faster way to get documents into the computer en masse.

 

[Shanghaichica]

Yeah.
Hit the browse button in the files app, then the three dots in the top right.
It allows you to save straight into the files app as a PDF

I didn't know this. Much more useful in the files app.

 

[adrianlondon]

I used this (via the Notes app, I also didn't know it could be done via Files) to scan in a lot of old photos I had.

Worked a treat.

Forgot to add: the photos get put into Photos automatically, so after you're done you can simply delete the created notes.

Next time, I'll do it via Files and see how that works.

(I knew about 3-finger drag on MacOS as it used to be the default, or maybe via Trackpad settings, and then one version of MacOS hid it under Accessibility and there was a thread on here where someone found it. I've had it enabled since forever.)

 

[matrix07]

Never understood why Apple buries some of it's best features.
There is another must turn on feature that is hidden away in the accessibility menu, Three Finger Drag for the Trackpad/Magic Trackpad. It allows you to just rest three fingers on the pad to move any object, moves dials, or to highlight. (Bonus! Once you start with three fingers you can continue the drag with just one). Turning it on also doesn't break any other function.

Three finger drag is way quicker than the double tap to drag, and no accidental opening of a file when trying to move it. Ten time better than the awkward press and hold while dragging. Makes highlighting stuff a dream.
Every friend I've shown this to has used it instead of the default for years now. Some even call me when getting a new Mac to ask where to turn it on is as it's not in the Trackpad options.

System Settings> Accessibility> Pointer Control> Trackpad Options> Dragging Style> Three Finger Drag

See! Buried as F This should be in the standard Trackpad option menu.

*I also remember when the world freaked out after learning hold spacebar to move cursor in iOS which Apple never told anyone.

macOS? Yeah that one used to be in trackpad setting (as it should) but after Steve gone 🤷 some geniuses at Apple just thought it’s a great idea to bury it in Accessibility features. This is always the first one I turned on when I got my new MacBook.

As for iOS scanning function you know what will be great? Having a shortcut to scan document so we can add a function right there on our Home Screen.

 

[jlc1978]

Going by your post no one knew the scanner function was built in to the notes app so what's the difference?

Some organizations do not allow downloading 3rd party software on issued devices; so built in will work but not a 3rd party app.

 

[matrix07]

Also you used to be able to ask your Mac to open your iPhone for scanning which was very useful. I think they have deprecated that now.
I never did know how to do it natively on iPhone. Thank you guys.

You’re still able to do it as a Hand Off feature I believe.

 

[IamTimCook]

Thank you, it is so much better, love it.

Yes, quite a lot is hidden in Settings > Accessibility that shouldn’t be hidden there in the first place.

You’re welcome. I’m glad others knew about it or are discovering it now.

 

[IamTimCook]

macOS? Yeah that one used to be in trackpad setting (as it should) but after Steve gone 🤷 some geniuses at Apple just thought it’s a great idea to bury it in Accessibility features. This is always the first one I turned on when I got my new MacBook.

I believe you’re right! I probably started using it then and learned I couldn’t live without it.

 

[ericwn]

And they say Apple doesn’t innovate

Exactly. They simply Sherlocked the functionality. Not as if there were no apps with OCR around prior. Awesome feature to strengthen their own Notes app of course.

 

[rambo47]

I have used Scanner Pro for PDFs for years, but I'm going to try the native PDF creation feature in iOS now.

 

[genovelle]

For what it's worth, Genius Scan is also on Android (and iOS) and works quite well (at least the iOS version does) https://play.google.com/store/apps/...zzlylabs.geniusscan.free&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1

That is what makes Apple devices better. For years, simple things like document scanning, saving as a PDF or heck just opening one required an installing an app on Android while it has long been a part of the OS with Apple. To this day I can’t send a PDF to friends on Android unless I use email or a special app. iMessage, done!

 

[genovelle]

Exactly. They simply Sherlocked the functionality. Not as if there were no apps with OCR around prior. Awesome feature to strengthen their own Notes app of course.

Google just appropriated an entire OS as their own. Interestingly, many of the so called Sherlocked features use Apple’s private APIs that the idea wouldn’t have been possible without Apple giving access in the first place.
Some that have been claimed were ironically listed in Apple patent applications long before hand.

Some companies seem to troll that information for ideas. It’s one huge flaw of thd patent system.