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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.



There is an easier way now!

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


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


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.


Oh awesome, didn’t know!


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?


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!




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