If you have an iPhone, you already have a scanner app for free

Did you know that iPhones already have a scanner tool built in?

In this world of remote working and learning, having a scanner — either a full blown one or one on your phone — can be very handy when sharing documents, images and other material.

To take advantage of this, open the “official” Apple notes app (it’s the one that looks like a white notebook with a yellow header).

Create a new note or open an existing one.

Then, click the camera icon and put select the “scan documents” option. Snap a photo of the document you want to scan.

You can change the mode in the upper right of the screen — auto mode will attempt to detect the document edges and adjust for that and will even “take” the photo itself once it determines the view is ideal. The manual option requires you to take the photo manually.

Once the photo is taken, you can adjust the scan’s corners.

You can then keep scanning if you have a multiple page document or use “retake” to discard the most recent image and replace it.

Once you’re all done, select “save” in the lower right and you can save the scan as a PDF.

The app also lets you swap between color and black and white or adjust cropping — as well as add more pages if needed.

You can also use iPhone’s markup tools to annotate or even sign the document if you needed.

Once you’re happy, the scan will appear inside of the note and you can use the “share” tool to others via a variety of methods, including emailing it to yourself, texting it or saving to tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive or more depending on how your phone is configured.