HOW TO Scan documents in Notes
1 Create a note
The scanner lives in the toolbar for each of your notes, so the first step is to open Notes, create a new note and tap the camera icon. If you prefer, you can long-press on the Notes icon on your Home Screen and tap Scan Document.
2 Point your phone
Here, we’re using an iPhone 12 Pro. The main window shows what your camera sees and has a big shutter button at the bottom (in portrait) or at the side (in landscape). You can set the flash and colour options using the top toolbar.
3 Adjust the image
Once you’ve scanned your item, tap on the image to bring up simple editing options to crop it, rotate it, adjust the colour mode or send it to the bin. There’s also a share icon at the top you can use to send it to another app or person.
4 Change the title
If there isn’t already some text in your Note, Notes will automatically try to title your new note using the first bit of text it finds in the scan – in this case, the phone number from our business card. Tap the title to rename it.
5 Use your info
Notes automatically uses character recognition to turn your scanned doc into usable text, and its Data Detectors then provide context-sensitive options – so here we can call, FaceTime or WhatsApp the number or add it to our contacts.
6 Integrate with apps
The Data Detectors in Notes are very comprehensive. This time instead of tapping the phone number on our business card, we’ve tapped the address – and it’s taken us straight there in the Maps app, ready to give directions.
7 Scan something bigger
Beyond business cards, the scanner in Notes can handle entire documents too – even complex ones like this magazine page. As we’ll discover, Notes can tell the difference between text and images in scanned pages.
8 Select the text
Once again Notes has automatically turned the image into text that you can copy and use elsewhere. Let’s find out how accurate the conversion is. As you can see the text is fairly small but our iPhone’s camera has taken a clear shot.
9 Wield the words
This is the text pasted into a note. This is exactly what Notes copied to our phone’s clipboard – we haven’t edited it. And you don’t need to paste the text to make your scan searchable; Notes can look inside each image.