How to Use Your iPhone as a Document Scanner

Smartphones will go down as one of the greatest inventions of all time, if they haven't already. Yes, you can make the argument they have their setbacks. Primarily, that we are constantly glued to them playing games, checking social media, or reading news stories which has likely led to increasingly small attention spans, but let's pretend that doesn't exist for a minute and focus more on one of the incredible, and relatively new features, your little pocket computer can do — scan documents.

It may not happen often, but I bet there have a been a few times you've talking to someone about something you read, let's say it's a favorite recipe you have in a cookbook, and they've said something like, "Ooooh, that sounds good, send it to me." Chances are you instinctively take a photo of the page and text or e-mail it to them. Which is all well and good if the picture is good. But as you likely know, taking a good picture of a page in a book isn't always the easiest thing. Inevitably there are shadows, some of the words run towards the crease of the book or magazine, or the photo is a little blurry making it tough to read. The scanner feature eliminates some of those issues. For example, if you can't get the document to lay flat, the scanner will flatten it for you after you take the picture. It also gives you a few filter options to help clean things up.

The best part is that it's super easy to do, and only takes a few taps using the built in Notes app on your iPhone.