Support MacOS Continuity Camera

Use case or problem

Quickly digitalizing physical documents or items into desktop obsidian using your phone camera , while leveraging desktop grade OCR (such as Apple Metal or Tesseract). Using the Obsidian app is insufficient as its much harder to use than the desktop app for many reasons, and accessing high quality OCR that you can integrate into your obsidian workflow is harder or impossible.

Proposed solution

MacOS Continuity Camera is an existing OS level feature from apple that allows you to take a start a flow from your macOS deivce that takes a photo on your iOS device then saves/ingests it on your macOS device with no extra user intervention. It is already implemented in many third party apps such as Microsoft Office (see screenshot of right click menu in Word below)

Screenshot 2024-08-25 at 12.57.17

Current workaround (optional)

This functionality can be achieved currently by opening the folder/note you want to add a Continuity image to in finder, using Finder’s Continuity Camera support to save the photo, and then dragging that into your app. This can be messy based on your asset management workflow, and require deleting a duplicate copy of the file, not to mention it is slower than the direct integration that exists in pretty much every other app I use like Office, Preview or PDF Expert.

Related feature requests (optional)

1 Like

A possible refinement of this workaround is to save the photo directly to the vault folder (or a subfolder of it), then type [[ in the note where you want the image. The newly-added file should be the first suggestion in the list that appears.