If you want to add a quick picture to your document, it might not work the way you want it to. 

For example, let me add a picture here that was just taken with the iPhone: 

Arrrgh. It didn’t work! It seems like an easy task to just take a picture and add it here. Well, here’s the work around you’ve been looking for. Continuity has some great features but doesn’t always work with non apple stuff. 

Now it works. Good Deal. Even though there are many ways to add a photo or video from your apple device, some just work better and faster than the others. 

To start, you’ll need to use only apple programs to get a seamless integration with photos. Let’s cover this and then— cover some of the best ways to get photos into stuff that’s not part of Apple’s suite. 

First, create a new Note. Then click on the Picture Icon up top to get the drop down menu as shown here. This account has 3 devices attached. See that? Phone, Pad3 and Pad4. Notice all the options like take photo, scan Doc and Add Sketch? We’ll just take a photo with the phone and add it here. Choose Take Photo with the phone and indicators appear. The Camera then turns on and snapping a pict gives you an option screen to use or retake, in case it looks blurry. 

Click Use and the photo is inserted. You just put a photo into your documents. 

Now, on to using the feature with non Apple programs. Here is a program called Paint X, 3rd picture. It doesn’t support adding a picture with the camera in the Apple way. So here is the simple trick. 

All you’ll need to do is take the photo as mentioned above using Apple’s Notes app among others, for example, (textedit, Freeform, etc.) and then copy/paste it to the new program not supporting Apple’s native Continuity features. 

Let’s do it here. In the 3rd picture, a second photo was taken in the above way with iPhone as camera (Apple Pencil). First, it was taken in the Notes program. Then it was “Cut” or moved to the clipboard. Now we switch to the non apple program Paint X. And Paste. You can think of this as a bridge that lets you use Apple’s cool features with non apple programs that don’t normally support those features. It’s an extra step but still a time saver if the program doesn’t support Continuity features, like Paint X.

That’s the trick. We will cover more of them as they come along.