You may own a flatbed scanner or perhaps one of those “all in one” printer/scanner/copier devices, but did you understand your smartphone camera can also fold as a flatbed scanner?
Kid forget to give your their eco-trip consent slip? Have them take a picture of it and ship it to you. Then utilize your iPhone’s Notes app to scan and sign it without downloading any third-party apps.
It’s not only quick and convenient to scan something when out from your computer, but the quality is surprisingly delicate, gratitude to much better camera sensors and more innovative software.
Your iPhone or Android gadget is also perfect for digitizing old photos (in albums, photo frames, or hanging on the wall), notes, business cards, whiteboards, documents (menus, contracts, vaccination proof), and receipts (ideal for expense tracking or reimbursement. Then store those images for when you need them or send them to someone else, if desired, via email or Text.
A “scan” really implies taking a “photo” of what you’re suggesting to the camera, but the technology can go beyond that.
Along with filling color and lighting correction to photos, today’s phones also brag about “OCR” technology, which implies “optical character recognition,” which can translate typewritten (and even handwritten) words into editable and searchable text.
Without OCR, when you scan an article, it holds it as an image file on your mobile, but you won’t be able to dig for a keyword or text a friend-specific sentence from within the article.
To digitally import Text using your iPhone’s Notes app, hover your camera lens over the desired Text, and it will magically appear as a Notes document.
Let’s check how to use the Notes app to scan documents and photos and even add a handwritten signature utilizing your fingertip.
- Open the Notes app and complete a new note (or select an existing one)
- Tap the Camera switch at the bottom of the screen and select Scan Documents.
- Place whatever you’re scanning your document given to the camera. If your gadget is in Auto mode, your paper will automatically scan. If you require to capture a scan manually, click the Shutter button to scan.
- Drag the corners to modify the scan to fit the page, then click Keep Scan.
- If you scanned a photo, you’d also notice some editing options at the bottom of your iPhone screen, such as adding a filter (such as black & white), cropping, tweaking the color and lighting, etc. Click Done, followed by Save.
How to Sign a document using iPhone
If the document you scanned requires to be signed, like that of a waiver to swim in a public pool, pursue these additional steps:
- Open the Notes app to click the document in the note.
- Click the Share key in the top right of your screen, and it seems like a square with an arrow pointing up—Click the Markup icon.
- Use the fingertip (or a stylus) to sign wherever you require. Before you sign, you can employ your fingers to zoom in and out the document. There are different pen and marker options to select at the bottom of the screen.
- When you’ve finished, click Done.
Use iPhone to Digitize Text.
Let us suppose you’re skimming through a cookbook and see something you enjoy making for dinner. Rather than typing out manually the ingredients, you require to purchase at the supermarket, gliding your iPhone camera above the recipe will instantly import the Text into your Notes app. Here’s how:
- Open the Notes app, and click to begin a new note.
- Click the Camera icon above the virtual keyboard and select Scan Text.
- Glide your iPhone camera above the Text you want to grab and watch the words pop up in the Notes app.
- When you’ve finished, click Done.
How to digitize Text with an Android smartphone
it’s easy for Android users to digitally scan Text, including OCR (optical character recognition), to digitize the captured words and numbers (ideal for importing business cards into your Contacts, for example). On the other hand, Android users can use the Google Drive app assembled into the phone to scan documents but employ the Camera app to digitize Text with OCR. If you don’t notice the Google Drive icon on your home screen, which skims like a colorful triangle, search for the word “drive,” and it’ll pop up.
How to use Android for regular documents:
- Open the Google Drive app, and at the bottom right, click Add (the large plus sign).
- Click the Scan icon.
- Directly take a photo of the document that you’d like to scan.
- To adjust the scan area, tap Crop (bottom right icon) and move the blue dots wherever you like (such as cropping out the top of a desk behind the document you’re scanning).
- If it’s a multi-page document you’re scanning and want them all to be part of one PDF document, tap the Add (“+”) symbol again to check more pages or tap the Checkmark to upload the record to Google Drive. (Every Google Account begins with 15Gb of free storage – shared over Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. You can always pay for more or select to download and save your scans to your smartphone’s memory if you prefer.)
- To save the finished document, tap Done.
How to digitize Text using an Android smartphone
- Open your Camera app and point the phone at a document.
- As you do this, the phone will recognize it’s a document – like a contract or a business card – and add highlighted borders in yellow, along with a “Scan” icon on the right side of the screen.
- Select the words Tap to Scan, and you’ll be prompted to draw the corners of the image to crop it. Tap the Save option.
- If you don’t see this option, open the Camera app’s Settings and choose Scene optimizer to ensure the “Scan documents” option is enabled.