I used Notes to scan 4 illustration boards from a party yesterday. They are in one document in a Note. They look really nice when scanned that way. But what’s the easiest way to then get all 4 scanned images into Photos so I can put them in an album?
Thanks.
Mac or mobile?
Mobile, you long-press on the photo, share, save image.
Mac, ctrl-click the photo, share, add to photos, or you should be able to drag and drop into photos.
I tried both before posting. But those options aren’t available. Here’s a screenshot from my iPhone for example.
On the Mac you get a more specific reason. When Notes scans multiple photos it apparently saves it as a PDF. So how to get those photos out and save them?
Yes, you scanned them as PDF, you didn’t add them as photos. As far as I know, you can’t add PDFs to the Photos app.
On a Mac, you can drag the PDF into a folder (or onto the desktop), open the PDF document with Preview, and then File / Export to JPEG, then add those JPEGs to the Photos app.
I can rescan them if it would help. Is there an option to scan them as photos? I didn’t see that. Or save them as photos as you can with Google PhotoScan? I tried PhotoScan first but it actually cut off part of the edges.
That was a way I do it in the past, but when I scanned one item per note. In this case, on the Mac if I open the PDF from Notes and then File / Export to JPEG it only exports the first image.
I didn’t try dragging the PDF to a folder first though. I’ll try that now.
It would be nice if there was a way to do it all on the iPhone of course. It would be even nicer if the Camera app had a scan feature! It would be useful for cases like this, and also for scanning old paper photos.
It’s the same. If I drag the PDF from Notes into a folder, open the PDF and the Export to JPEG it only exports the image on page one. So it misses the other three.
In the PDF if I select each page separately and one-by-one export to JPEG it works. Sort of cumbersome. It would be nice if there were a general solution. Thanks.
In Preview, you can use the Rectangular Selection tool (Tools Menu) to select photos and then copy them. Then from the File Menu, click ‘New from Clipboard’. Presto, you now have a new Preview window that can be saved as a JPEG.
So, you can create a folder of JPEGs and then Import them into Photos where you can easily create an album.
Out of curiosity I just tried that. Isn’t that harder? Don’t you have to properly capture a rectangular area for each image separately and then paste from the clipboard? Isn’t it easier to just select each image one-by-one with a single click and export at JPEG?
A screengrab will be a much lower resolution than your iPhone’s camera, I wouldn’t recommend that over saving each PDF page as a JPEG. Rather than using Notes, there’s a ton of scanning apps available for the iPhone, I recommend Scanner Pro from Readdle, but there are free options too.
Next time I’ll try Scanner Pro. I have that. I tried Photo Scan first, but it missed edges this time.
On your iPhone, there is literally a camera button, then “take photo or video”. This, honestly, is probably how you want to do it. Though of course on a Mac you can just use whichever scanner you’d use to scan photos, make sure that the scanner is set to capture jpeg, and attach the scans to the note.
Taking a regular photo of a photo or illustration doesn’t do nearly as good a job as one of the scanner apps, which take care of things like extra light reflections, etc.
I usually use Photo Scan these days because after moving to their suggested 4 corners digitized old print photos look really nice.
