[morisy]

A few folks have talked about digitizing paper documents, so one of my favorite tricks for iPhone havers:

iPhones have very nice scanning tools built in, but it’s buried in the Notes app. Create a new note, click the camera icon, then “scan documents” and it will create a very nice, usually well cropped and OCRd scan that’s saved as a PDF you can then export elsewhere. Wish it was a standalone app because it works so well, and this is from someone who helps digitize and preserve paper documents for a living.

[newaccount74]

There is an easier way now!

In the "Files" app, tap the (...) icon in the top right corner and select "Scan Documents".

[alkhatib]

Long press the notes app icon, and you’ll get a shortcut to scan documents

[coderatlarge]

If you want a standalone app, Microsoft Lens is actually pretty good for creating pdfs from pictures.

I agree it's great to be able to do this natively on iphone without third-party apps.

[morisy]

Oh awesome, didn’t know!

[coderatlarge]

thanks for sharing - it's a great feature.

one problem I've found with notes is that they don't appear to have any kind of export mechanism - i.e., you're tied to apple and that app. Is that right?

[morisy]

Tap the down arrow by the PDF, then click “share” and you can email it, move to Dropbox, whatever. They don’t make it obvious it’s just a regular PDF!