HOW TO Scan documents in Notes

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. Or, you can long–press on the Notes icon on your Home Screen and tap Scan Document.

Change the title

If there isn’t already some text in your Note, Notes will 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.

Scan something bigger

Beyond business cards, the scanner in Notes can handle entire documents too. As we’ll discover, Notes can tell the difference between text and images in scanned pages.

Point your phone

Here, we’re using an iPhone 12 Pro. The main window shows what your camera sees and has a shutter button at the bottom (in portrait) or at the side (in landscape). Set the flash and color options using the top toolbar.

Use your info

Notes uses character recognition to turn your scan into usable text, and then it provides context–sensitive options — so here we can call, FaceTime, or WhatsApp the number or add it to our contacts.

Select the text

Notes has 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.

Adjust the image

Once you’ve scanned your item, tap on the image to bring up editing options to crop it, rotate it, adjust the color mode, or send it to the bin. There’s a share icon at the top so you can send it to another app or person.

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.

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.