How to Scan Documents Into Your Mac With an iPhone

Your iPhone is a better scanner than most flatbeds — edge detection, automatic perspective correction, multi-page PDFs — and Continuity Camera wires it directly into macOS. Right-click in a folder, scan on the phone, and the PDF appears on the Mac. No cables, no AirDrop, no emailing yourself.

Scan straight into a Finder folder

1. On the Mac, right-click on the desktop or inside the Finder folder where you want the scan.
2. Choose Import from iPhone or iPad → Scan Documents (your device is named in the menu).
3. Your iPhone wakes up in scanning mode. Hold it over the page — it finds the document edges and captures automatically when the page is steady. Flatten curled paper with a hand outside the frame.
4. Keep going for more pages; each capture adds a page to the same document. Tap a thumbnail to drag the corner handles if a crop needs fixing, or retake it.
5. Tap Save on the phone. A PDF appears in the folder on your Mac, immediately.

The scanner ties both devices together live: the Mac shows a "waiting for you to scan" panel while the phone works. Multi-page paperwork — a lease, a tax packet — comes out as one PDF in the right folder with zero shuttling.

Scan into Notes, Mail, and other apps

The same command lives inside Apple's document apps, and it inserts the scan at your cursor:

• Notes: File → Import from iPhone or iPad → Scan Documents, or right-click in the note body. The scan embeds in the note — searchable, synced, and a solid filing system for receipts.
• Mail: in a compose window, the same right-click attaches the scan to the message.
• TextEdit, Pages, Keynote, Numbers: same menu, scan lands in the document.

In scanning mode, the shutter menu offers Color, Grayscale, Black & White, and Photo renditions — Black & White makes the smallest, sharpest files for text documents. Auto-capture can be switched to Manual (top of the iPhone screen) when you want to frame each page yourself.

The requirements checklist

Continuity Camera is picky about exactly four things; when the menu item is missing or grayed out, one of these is off:

• Both devices signed into the same Apple ID.
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned on on both — the handshake runs over Bluetooth, so they must be near each other (roughly 10 meters).
• The iPhone running iOS 12 or later, the Mac on any modern macOS — every Ventura, Sonoma, or Sequoia machine qualifies.
• Not sharing a connection: turn off the iPhone's Personal Hotspot if the Mac is using it, since that blocks the pairing.

Still stubborn after checking those? Toggle Bluetooth off and on on both devices — it resets the pairing and fixes most one-off failures.

Scans are searchable, too

macOS runs text recognition on scanned PDFs and images, so Spotlight can find your scan by the words on the page, and Preview's Live Text lets you select and copy from it. A pile of scanned receipts in a Finder folder is effectively a searchable database — no manual renaming required, though a quick date-prefix habit (2026-07 lease.pdf) never hurts.

A few captures-side habits produce noticeably better scans. Lay the page on a contrasting background — white paper on a dark table lets edge detection lock on instantly, white-on-white makes it hunt. Get light coming from the side rather than behind you, so your own shadow stays off the page. And for anything destined for printing or OCR, switch the filter to Black & White before capturing: text comes out darker, backgrounds drop to clean white, and file sizes shrink to a fraction of the color version.