The shot is on your Mac
before you look up.
Hit one hotkey. Your iPhone takes the photo, it flies over direct Wi-Fi, and it's sitting in your folder about a second later. No Preview window. No iCloud wait.
Hit one hotkey. Your iPhone takes the photo, it flies over direct Wi-Fi, and it's sitting in your folder about a second later. No Preview window. No iCloud wait.
You dig through an app's menu or bounce through Preview, or you just wait for iCloud and Photos to sync the shot you took a moment ago over to your Mac. Too many steps to get one picture where you need it. The camera was never the problem — the path to the file was.
A hotkey on your Mac opens your iPhone's camera; the moment you shoot, the JPEG lands in your screenshot folder (or ~/Desktop) about a second later. It arrives over Apple's peer-to-peer Wi-Fi — AWDL, the same transport AirDrop uses — so there's no iCloud to wait on. Photos become IMG_*.jpg, scans become Scan_*.pdf (multi-page → one PDF).
Drop Apple's importFromDeviceIdentifier item into an app's main menu and the system attaches per-device Take Photo / Scan Documents actions. ContinuityCapture discovered that submenu.update() populates those items headlessly — the menu never appears — then performActionForItem fires the capture. The shot itself needs no permissions on the Mac: no camera, no microphone, no UI scripting.
Anywhere. The Mac wakes your iPhone's camera without opening a thing on screen.
⌥⌘P photo · ⌥⌘S scanPhoto or scanned PDF, sent over direct Wi-Fi. No iCloud sync, no AirDrop prompt.
AWDL · directSaved where you set it — and auto-pasted into whatever app you fired it from.
IMG_*.jpg / Scan_*.pdfPhoto and scan, a one-second save, clipboard and smart auto-paste — the daily loop, and none of the clutter around it.
Photos land as IMG_*.jpg, scans as Scan_*.pdf — multi-page becomes one PDF.
Straight over AWDL Wi-Fi — no iCloud, no waiting on Photos to sync.
⌘V into the app you fired the hotkey from, right after you shoot.
Terminals and IDEs get the file path; AI apps and browsers get the image.
No camera, microphone, or UI scripting needed on the Mac side.
Set the save folder and paste targets with defaults — no rebuild.
MIT-licensed, with the full source on GitHub. And the trade-offs, up front:
--self-test first to check the device list and log.xattr -d line.You'll need macOS 14+ and Xcode Command Line Tools. build.sh builds, signs, and installs to ~/Applications — then bind a hotkey with Alfred, Shortcuts, or Karabiner (it ships photo ⌥⌘P, scan ⌥⌘S), each just running open -na ContinuityCapture --args photo.