I had the opportunity to work in an archive this past week researchers were encouraged to use their phones (without flash) to capture images of papers. Because my time was short, instead of transcribing a number of documents — how we used to do it in the olden days — I captured them with my iPhone (good enough for OCR or later hand transcription). My thought was I would just print to PDF out of Photos, but there doesn’t seem to be that option. I can print print or I can export as yet more images.
I’m looking for a quick, easy, down and dirty workflow that will let me select 2-8 images and output them as a PDF which I can then edit in Preview or OCR in Devonthink.
I just selected a handful of JPEGs in Finder. I opened all of them at once in the Preview app. Selected all in Preview. Performed Print > PDF > Save to PDF.
This was my thought as well but I think the OP wants to print photos from iPhone to .pdf.
I go into Photos, select the items and hit the SHARE icon,
then scroll down to PRINT (I have a PRINT option, even though I have NO printer) this brings up OPTIONS with a SHARE icon next to it, select that and then Select FILES - This will output a .pdf.
SO - 2 Share icons does the trick for me, BUT only photos, no video or Live photos; jpeg, or .heic only.
You’re probably right but that just seems like making the task harder than it has to be. I would Air Drop the images to my Mac and get on with things. In my world, an iPhone is strictly for getting by until I can get back to my Mac.
For clarification, the images are in Photos on my Mac.
I have found that I can ctrl-click on the selected images, click Edit in…, and I just send them to Preview, where I then print them to PDF. This seems like at least two steps too many.
Sorry, I’m not tracking the “two steps too many”.
You are selecting WHAT you want and HOW you
want to process it, which seems fundamental to
me for any piece of data.
(BUT I’m the guy who goes through the two share sheet dance, , )
So I tried selecting a few JPEGs in Finder and, lo and behold, there is a Print command on the File menu. But selecting it just gave me a bunch of these error dialogs.
What I am getting is that there is no way to do this from within Photos. So, really, this means dragging the images out of the app, or digging into the app’s “package” (which makes me, I admit, a little nervous) in the Pictures directory.
I just did not expect there to be so many steps to what seems like a fairly straightforward task, especially for an app that claims a mild form of OCR.
For future reference, is there a “scanning” app for iOS that makes this a little less troublesome.
UPDATE: I tried a version of what you mentioned @tomalmy : I selected multiple images, used CMD + Return to use Preview to edit them, and then I could save to PDF from there. (This still seems like one needless step added, but I’ll take that over two.)
Easiest was to do it more directly, 1 step. Open the Files app on your phone. Tap the Circle-3 dot button in the top right corner and select Scan documents. Scan your pages. They’ll all scan into 1 pdf. I think you can do around 18-20 scans per pdf before it will prompt you to save the pdf.
Save. Done. Open the pdf in Files and enjoy an automatically OCR’d file.
Note, navigate to the folder you’d like to scan to and then scan as it will then save to that location. Otherwise, of course, you can always move it after you scan.
Cross purposes here. I was only addressing Karlnyhus’ problem with error dialogs. I’ve got no solution to your original issue (printing to PDF from Photos in iOS).
Now that I think in more general terms, the way I would do this sort of thing is to fire up the File > Import from iPhone command in my EagleFiler app, scan all the images of papers into a document, save it, and print it out of EagleFiler.
But this command is not special to EagleFiler. Now that I look, the Preview app itself has the same command. This is a general capability that Apple added to the OS several versions back. I’ve never tried it from Preview on account of always having EagleFiler to file my stuff in.
)
Open the pdf in Files and enjoy an automatically OCR’d file.
