XDA Basics: How to Scan Documents on Mac with Continuity Camera

Apple’s new M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are certainly among the best laptops that you can get, and for good reason. The M1 chip handles most intensive tasks with ease, and given that Apple makes both the hardware and the macOS software, the optimization is top-notch. In fact, the software alone is a big reason why a lot of consumers opt for a Mac over a Windows PC.

You may have heard a lot of chatter around the Apple ‘ecosystem’ especially among tech enthusiasts or from anyone who uses a host of Apple devices. The closely-knit integration that Apple has achieved through its software trickery makes things a lot more convenient for the end-user. Be it AirDrop for quickly sharing files, HandOff to answer your calls from your Mac, or Continuity that lets you use multiple Apple devices to complete a task. One of the more interesting features that belong to this list is the Continuity Camera option.

What is Continuity Camera?

Continuity Camera allows you to use the camera on any of your iOS or iPad OS devices to capture an image. This is very likely a document that you may want to scan, and you can then either save it as a file on your Mac or attach it directly to an email, iMessage, or a note. In order to use Continuity Camera, you’ll need a Mac (of course) and an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. If you find yourself in situations where you quickly need to attach a document but don’t have the time to use a dedicated scanner, Continuity Camera can be handy.

Basic Requirements to use Continuity Camera

Before we begin, there are a few pre-requisites that you need to check for:

1. Your Mac should be running on macOS Mojave or later.
2. The iPhone/iPad you plan to use to scan the documents should be running iOS 12 or later.
3. Connect both the Mac and the iPhone/iPad to the same Wi-Fi network and turn on Bluetooth on both devices.
4. Lastly, both the Mac and iPhone/iPad should be logged in with the same Apple ID.

Once you’ve made sure that your devices satisfy these conditions, we can move on to the process of using Continuity Camera on your Mac.

How to Scan Documents on Mac using Continuity Camera

Continuity Camera can be used in a host of apps like Finder, Notes, Mail, Messages, and even in third-party apps like the Microsoft Office Suite. The steps to use the feature in all of these apps are the same.

• Open the app where you want to use Continuity Camera to scan a document on your Mac.
• Right-click or control-click within the text field of the app or in the window where you want the scanned document to be added. This brings up the contextual menu.

• Next, look for the Import from iPhone/iPad option depending on what device(s) you have, and hover your cursor over it. Select the Scan Documents option. Doing so should instantly open the camera viewfinder on your iPhone iPad. This option is visible under Your iPhone in some apps.

• Place the document you wish to scan in front of your iPhone/iPad. The viewfinder will automatically detect documents and scan them by cropping out the surrounding area.
• If you wish to scan the document manually or your device is unable to detect the document, you can frame the document as per your liking and hit the shutter button to complete the scan.

• You can scan multiple pages/documents one after the other. Select Save once you’re done scanning all the required documents. Your scanned documents will now appear on your Mac as a PDF file.

Alternative Uses of Continuity Camera

In case you wish to use Continuity Camera with an app that does not support the feature, for example on Google Chrome, you can control-click on a Finder window and fire up the scanner. Your scanned document will be saved as a PDF file in the same directory where you launched the scanner inside Finder. You can then attach or upload the PDF file wherever required.

If you don’t necessarily have a document to scan and just want to add a photo, you can choose to do that by selecting the Take Photo option in the contextual menu instead of selecting Scan Document. Alternatively, you can also choose to add a sketch via your iPhone/iPad. If you happen to have both a good iPhone and a good iPad, we would suggest you use your iPhone to scan your documents since the primary camera on the iPhone produces better pictures when compared to the one on the iPad.

Continuity Camera is one of the simplest ways to scan and attach documents on your Mac without having to use any additional accessories for your Mac or iPhone. Given how capable the cameras on newer iPhone devices have gotten, the quality of the scans should not be an issue either if you have adequate sources of light. This is just one of the few examples of how Apple devices can communicate with each other seamlessly and help make your workflow more convenient.

The post XDA Basics: How to Scan Documents on Mac with Continuity Camera appeared first on xda-developers.

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