The promise of having a cordless scanner like the Doxie Go, which I reviewed here, is to be able to do the entire paperless workflow without having to plug in to a computer.

Last week I posted about how you can use the Doxie Go with the iPad’s Camera Connection Kit. Today I am going to go through how to achieve the holy grail: scan with the Doxie Go and have the scans appear on the iPad wirelessly.

For that, I will use Doxie’s iPhone/iPad Sync Kit. The folks at Apparent (makers of Doxie) offered to send me a review copy to test out, which was cool of them.

As it turns out, the Doxie kit is actually the Eye-Fi 4GB Connect X2, which comes in the original box along with instructions for using with the Doxie.

The TL;DR version is that it works really well, though the initial setup is a bit more involved.

The Goal

I want to be able to scan documents and have them save to the iPad without having to plug anything in. The entire process will take place on the Doxie Go and the iPad.

What You’ll Need

• A Doxie Go
• Doxie’s Sync Kit or, I would guess, any Eye-Fi card
• The free Eye-Fi iOS app
• An iOS app that lets you create PDFs. I will be using Save2PDF

Setup

I am not going to go through the step-by-step setup, because Doxie’s instruction page is quite good. Here is the high-level workflow:

First, you plug the SD card into the supplied card reader and plug it into a free USB port on your computer.

Once you do that, you install the Eye-Fi Center software and choose where you want scans to go.

Then you install the free Eye-Fi app on your iPad, and follow the rest of the setup steps.

By default, it will create a private Wi-Fi network that you need to connect to with your iPad in order to receive the scans.

In Doxie’s instructions, they recommend doing a few additional settings so that the Eye-Fi can use your existing network, and then switch to the private network if yours is not available. A helpful touch.

Scanning and Importing

To scan, put the Eye-Fi in the back of the Doxie Go and put your paper in. On the iPad, fire up the Eye-Fi app and within a minute or so (usually much less), your scans will automatically populate in the app.

If you want, you can view, email, and share your scans right from the Eye-Fi app.

You don’t need to do anything else. Your scan is imported as JPG in the Camera Roll.

Doing Something With The Scans

From there, the rest of the workflow is the same as in the previous Doxie Go iPad post. You can leave it as JPG, convert it to PDF, or do whatever you want.

All in all, using the Doxie Go iPhone/iPad Sync Kit is very cool. The initial setup is more involved, but there is something magical about running a piece of paper through the scanner and having it automatically appear on the iPad.

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A few weeks ago, I reviewed the Doxie Go, a new portable scanner that lets you scan documents without being attached to a computer.

In my review, I mainly focused on the scanner itself, how to get documents on to your computer, and only briefly touched on the ability to do the entire scan workflow using a mobile device.

Inspired by a Twitter exchange with the awesome Justin Lancy, I’d like to rectify that with a two part series. Today I’ll be going into detail about how to use the Doxie Go with the iPad’s Camera Connection Kit. In a few days, I’ll have Part 2 using Doxie’s iPhone/iPad Sync Kit.

The Goal

I want to be able to scan some documents, organize them, and act on them, all without using a Mac or Windows PC. The entire process will take place using the Doxie Go and my iPad.

What You’ll Need

• A Doxie Go, obviously
• Apple’s iPad Camera Connection Kit
• An SD Card
• An iOS app that lets you create PDFs. I will be using Save2PDF

Scanning

To start with, put your SD card into the slot at the back of the Doxie.

Then, turn the power on and scan your documents normally. When you put the page into the scanner, the Doxie Go will automatically grab it and start scanning.

When you are done, power down and take the SD card out.

Importing To iPad

Now it is time to import the scans to your iPad. The Doxie Go stores scanned documents as JPG, one file per page. It stores it as if it was a digital camera, so Apple’s Camera Connection Kit can read them.

Plug the SD reader into the bottom of the iPad, and then plug the SD card into the reader.

When you do, the Photos app will start up and you can import the pages that you want.

The pages will then appear in your iPad’s photos.

Converting To PDF

You could stop there if you wanted, and just use the document as a JPG, email it to someone, or sync it back to your computer later when you are able to. However, that is not what we want to do today. We want to take our scanned documents all the way to PDF.

There are many apps to do this, but I will use one called Save2PDF, mainly because I had already purchased it due to this now-useless-thanks-to-iOS5 blog post.

Fire up Save2PDF and tap on Images at the bottom. Hit the plus button, and you can go to the Last Import library and choose the first page that you want to import.

If you are doing a multi-page PDF, tap the plus button again and add the rest of your pages one by one.

If you want to preview your pages, hit the little eye button down at the bottom.

When you are ready to create your PDF, hit the PDF button up at the top-right corner.

Now you’ll get a dialog box with some settings. Here you can rearrange the pages if you want, and I recommend that you change the page settings.

• Tap on Paper Size and set it to the correct paper size (I have US Letter)
• Tap on each page and set image size from 4×6 to Fill page

When you are ready, give the file a name and you can either email it, or hit Save.

From there, you can either save the PDF to the Save2PDF application, or upload it to a cloud service like Dropbox or iCloud.

I have instructions for setting up Dropbox in my earlier Save2PDF post, so head over there if you want to know how to set it up.

If you do save the PDF to the Save2PDF app, you can export it by hitting the weird looking export button.

Doing Something With the PDF

Scanning without a computer is only half the battle. You need to be able to do something with the PDF.

Once you have the PDF where you want it, you can email it, open it in GoodReader or another PDF management application and annotate it, send it to cloud services, and do almost anything with it, without the need for a Mac or Windows machine.

The one thing this workflow won’t do is OCR. I haven’t found a great solution for that yet, so if you have one, please let us know in the comments. If you are an Evernote Premium user, you can open the PDF in Evernote and they will do the OCR for you on the server.

So, that is a workflow using the Doxie Go, the iPad’s Camera Connection Kit and Save2PDF. If you have other software that works better for this, let me know.

Stay tuned for the next post in a few days where I use Doxie’s iPhone/iPad Connection Kit to do all this wirelessly.

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