Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
How to Use the New iOS 11 Document Scanner in Notes on iPad and iPhone
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Oh nice! Gotta love New England this time of year. And lucky you moving to a tax free state lol
[doublepost=1506112635][/doublepost]Wish they’d just bake this into the Camera app and let u drop it into your photo album. Would be much more flexible. I use Microsoft Lens extensively as such.
In iOS 11, there's a new feature in Notes that allows you to quickly scan all kinds of documents so you can keep track of everything from receipts to recipes to photos.
The Document Scanner detects the edges of a document, aligns things properly, and removes all glare and tilt so you get a clean scan every time. The new feature is available on both iPhone and iPad. Here's how to use it:
Once the document scanning interface is open, there are a few additional steps to follow to get a clear scan.
- Open the Notes app.
- Create a new note.
- If the keyboard is open, tap on the black "+" button located above the keyboard. On iPhone, it's in the middle, and on iPad, it's on the right side of the display.
- If the keyboard is closed, tap on the yellow "+" button at the bottom of the Notes app.
- Choose "Scan Documents."
The Document Scanner is set up to take multiple scans in a row, so once you tap "Keep Scan," it returns to the scanning interface. To get back to Notes after you've scanned all of your documents, you'll need to tap on "Save."
- Tap on the three circles at the top to choose color, grayscale, black and white, or photo for your scan. The default option is color.
- Tap on the flash icon if you need to adjust the flash options. The default is auto, which will cause the flash to go off if you're in a room with low light.
- Focus the camera on your document, making sure the yellow box is lined up with the edges of your document.
- When it's aligned, press on the camera button to snap a photo.
- Adjust the edges of your scan to get a perfect alignment. The Notes app will automatically correct for any tilting.
- If the scan is to your liking, choose "Keep Scan." If you want to try again, choose "Retake."
Your scanned document is inserted into the current note, where it can be edited. To edit, simply tap on the scan. Editing tools include adding an additional scan, cropping, changing the color, changing the orientation, and opening up the Share sheet to send it to Messages, Mail, social networks, and other apps.
Apple's document scanning tools are well engineered and impressive, producing dozens of clear, clean scans in our tests, with excellent performance on everything from photos to documents. Apple's new Notes tool rivals even well-established third-party document scanners and can easily replace them.
Article Link: How to Use the New iOS 11 Document Scanner in Notes on iPad and iPhone
Seems such an inefficient way to force a note to be created to take advantage of this feature.
Really? Scanner Pro is still way better. the scan itself is darker and easier to read, it scans text (OCR) automatically so it is easily searchable and it saves as .pdf in any location you want.
This Notes version is ok if you don't have a better alternative but if you already have Scanner Pro, I wouldn't give it up. It's not even close to being half as good.
Last edited:
I agree. I just used Notes to do a couple tests and Scanner Pro gets a PDF scanned and in my ~/Documents folder with fewer steps.
I think using Notes for this will be okay for the occasional user who does not have something like Scanner Pro, but Scanner Pro seems more streamlined for this purpose.
So it doesn't do OCR? They should make scans searchable, especially if they're being kept in "Notes" which is supposed to be searchable..
I have been using JotNot Pro for this -- scan receipts and store in DropBox, then a Hazel rule on my server moves the file into a receipts folder. While the new feature is great for scanning documents or taking pictures and putting them in a note, it's not a replacement for what I'm scanning on the go.
Do note that it doesn’t work well with scanning documents that are folded. I tried to use the feature to send some scans of my AP World History source documents to a classmate and it was only seeing the bottom half of the paper due to the fold. Hopefully they will fix this in a later update.
One thing I really HATE about Scanbot is how you have to restore your Pro purchase EVERY TIME you update (which come frequently). I wonder if it’s the same for other apps. I much preferred it when I only needed to pay once, when it wasn’t freemium.
Inhave ypdated my iphone 6s plus already to uos 11, but how come i dont have the scanner feature?♀️
Back in iOS 4, maybe 5 I somehow recall an OS kernel level ability in OS X had create PDF built in and brought over to iOS. Possibly in the print dialog but haven’t seen it since or my recollection is incorrect.
Confirmed as others have. Also didn’t Apple state scanned documents had searchable text within iOS?!
Are you referring to the ability to create a PDF by using the print function and then 2 finger spreading the item to be “printed”?
basically yeah - \unsure about 2 finger spreading the item; as I've never seen an item (webpage, document - local/icloud sourced) prior to iOS 11.
