How to scan with iPhone
I’ve built a habit over the last few years of scanning just about piece of paper that comes into my life. Receipts, letters, bills, anything and everything! So I thought I’d show you how quickly I do it and how to scan with your iPhone too.
The app I use is called Scanner Pro and I picked this app for a few reasons:
- It has character recognition built in
- It automatically uploads to Dropbox
- It automatically adds the date to everything I scan
Character Recognition
This is where the paper is ‘read’ so that the words on the page are not just pixels but are actual words that you highlight and search for. Character recognition or OCR is a critical part in making your scanned documents easier to find later.
Dropbox
Uploading to Dropbox means that the files are only stored on phone for a short time, so if I lose my phone or have to reset my phone and install everything again then I’ll never lose the documents I’ve scanned in the past.
I have Dropbox installed on my Mac, and my iPad too, so that the moment something is uploaded it’s then searchable. And like I said before learning how to scan with your iPhone is only the first part.
Automatic Naming
The other important reason I use this app is so that it adds the date into the name for me without having to think about it. You can specific other naming conventions as needed, by I generally use the date in year, month, day format.
In addition to using this iPhone app, and Dropbox, I also use a tool called Hazel on my mac to organise everything into folders and I use another tool called CloudHQ to synchronise everything from Dropbox into Evernote… but that’s for another day.
