Did you know you can use your iPhone as a scanner for your Mac? Here’s how

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It’s time for a knowledge bomb; because this underutilized feature that comes baked into macOS, iOS and iPadOS is too darn useful. Did you know you could use your iPhone as a document scanner, or to bring images directly into your documents on macOS?

It’s called Continuity Camera, and I only found out about it today thanks to an off-hand tweet from Owen Willams, Shopify’s UX Manager. It’s ridiculously good if you often need to bring images into your Mac documents, and it’s such a simple process.

Below, we’ll show you how you can take advantage of this feature that has been around since macOS Mojave and iOS 12.

Continuity Camera is the Apple feature you didn’t know you needed

Open any supported application on your Mac. That includes Finder, Notes, Keynote, Numbers, Mail, Pages, Messages, and TextEdit.

Control-click in the document you want the image to appear. Then find Import from iPhone or Ipad > Take Photo in the menu that appears.

Pick up your iPhone or iPad, snap a photo then tap on Use Photo (this will be a prompt that happens when using this method)

The photo will automatically appear inside the document you were editing on your Mac.

You can also scan documents to PDF, using the Scan Documents option from the earlier menu

When you get to the scanning step, your iPhone or iPad will automatically scan the page when you point your camera at it. Keep scanning all the pages you want to add, then tap on Keep Scan on your device’s touchscreen.

If Continuity Camera isn’t working for you, Make sure you’re signed in to the same Apple ID on all of your devices and check your devices are on the same WiFi network. From there, make sure Bluetooth is enabled on both devices and check for any device updates, as you have to at least be on macOS Mojave and iOS/iPadOS 12.

Neat trick, right? No more waiting for iCloud Photos to sync, no more fiddling with AirDrop settings, and no more scanning documents with third-party apps like Dropbox just so you can edit them on your Mac.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.