How do I scan a document?

Use the iPhone or iPad app — your phone is the scanner.

1. Create a note (or open one) and choose the document scan option.
2. Point the camera at the page. Harbor uses Apple’s document-scanning engine, so edges are detected automatically and the page is straightened and cleaned up for you.
3. Add more pages if you have them, then save. The scan lands in your note.

Here’s the part that makes scanning worth doing: after the scan syncs, Harbor’s server runs OCR on it. A little while later, every legible word in that document is searchable — and when a search hits, the viewer highlights the exact word right on the page. Scan the furnace warranty today, search “heat exchanger” in three years, and Harbor opens the page with the phrase lit up. More on that in How does OCR search work?

A few related ways to capture paper and pictures:

• Snap a regular photo into a note — photos go through OCR too.
• On the Mac or web app, drag in a PDF or image; same treatment.
• At launch, you can also email documents to your Harbor address — handy for a scanner that emails what it scans.
• For a real desk scanner and a stack of paper, point Harbor at the folder it saves into — see How do watched folders work? Everything that lands there becomes a note on its own, and the folder can name each note from what’s on the page instead of after the scanner’s filename.

One plain caveat: if you encrypt a note, its attachments are excluded from OCR and search — that’s the encryption trade-off.