Importing from Continuity Camera

The Camera action lets you add to your current document pages scanned live from your iPhone or iPad, thanks to the macOS Continuity Camera feature. It is available from the Organization category of the Dashboard (camera icon, labelled Camera). This feature is exclusive to macOS.

Prerequisites

To use this feature, your environment must meet the conditions macOS imposes for Continuity Camera:

• a Mac running macOS 26.2 or later — HtkPDF's minimum, well beyond what Continuity Camera itself requires;
• an iPhone or iPad running iOS/iPadOS 12 or later;
• both devices must be signed in to the same Apple Account;
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi must be enabled on both devices;
• the devices must be near each other.

If one of these conditions is not met, the Continuity Camera menu is shown but no device appears in it.

Starting a scan

1. Click the Camera button in the Organization category of the Dashboard.
2. A contextual menu offers the available actions of your iPhone or iPad, usually:
   • Scan Documents: triggers the scanner mode of your iPhone's Camera application (automatic edge detection, perspective correction, several successive pages);
   • Take Photo: captures a single image without correction.
3. Choose the action you want. Your iOS device automatically switches to camera mode.
4. Take the shot or shots on your iPhone or iPad.
5. Confirm by tapping Save (or Use Photo for a single shot). The result is sent to your Mac.

Integration into the current document

Once the scan is received by HtkPDF, its content is added at the end of the document currently open:

• Multi-page scan (PDF): each page of the generated PDF is inserted in order, at the end of the document;
• Single image (JPEG, PNG, TIFF): a new PDF page is created from the image and added at the end of the document.

The page counter and the Dashboard preview thumbnail are updated automatically. A checkpoint named Camera import is added to the History, which lets you return to the state before the import in case of a mistake.

The document then moves into the pending changes state: to keep the addition, save explicitly through the Save button on the Dashboard (⌘S).

Repositioning the imported pages

Imported pages always arrive at the end of the document. To position them elsewhere (at the start or in the middle, for example):

1. Open the Reorder module from the Organization category;
2. Drag the freshly added thumbnails to the desired location in the grid.

If you added several pages at once and they must all stay grouped, select them before dragging: the selection then moves as a coherent block.

Best practices

• Framing: for multi-page scans, do use the Scan Documents mode rather than Take Photo — the first option automatically corrects perspective and applies a contrast optimized for text.
• Searchable text: scanning produces an image PDF. To make the text selectable and indexable, then run the Text extraction module with the OCR option enabled and paste the result into a new document, or keep the scan as an image layer and add manual annotations through the Highlight / Note modules.
• Unstable connection: if the device does not appear in the menu or the transmission fails, turn Wi-Fi off and back on on both devices, or move them closer together.

Note: Continuity Camera uses the macOS system mechanism (Services). HtkPDF only has access to the final result of the scan: no image is sent to remote servers and all processing stays local to your Apple hardware.

Screenshots

1 screenshot — click to enlarge

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