Patent ID: 9749480
Date: 2017-08-29
CPC Classifications: H04N

Claim:
1. In an image scanning system including a network-linked image scanning apparatus, personal computer, and cloud server, the image scanning apparatus including a user interface, and storage storing a user address book recording users of the image scanning apparatus and storing user-authentication information associated with the users recorded in the address book, the cloud server having cloud-server storage with folders for storing data from the image scanning apparatus, an image scanning method, comprising: logging into the cloud server, through the personal computer, and based on the login, obtaining cloud-server login-confirmed information; generating, in the personal computer, a data file as a scan cloud ticket for initiating a scan-data cloud-storage job, the scan cloud ticket including a path to a predetermined folder in the cloud-server storage, cloud-server login-confirmed information, scan-cloud ticket validity period information, and user-authentication information; sending the scan cloud ticket from the personal computer to the image scanning apparatus; receiving, in the image scanning apparatus, the scan cloud ticket; using the user-authentication information in the scan cloud ticket, confirming that the scan-data cloud-storage job is from a user recorded in the address book, and user-associatively storing the confirmed scan cloud ticket in the image-scanning-apparatus storage; carrying out a scan-cloud-ticket receipt response process of returning, to the personal computer, information indicating that the image scanning apparatus has received the scan cloud ticket, and indicating the time of receipt; setting a validity expiration reference time, based on the validity period information in the scan cloud ticket, to the scan-cloud-ticket receipt time; accepting, through user-interface input into the image scanning apparatus in response to the image scanning apparatus receiving the scan cloud ticket, an initiation operation for initiating the scan-data cloud-storage job, conditional on the user-interface input being within the validity period; performing, in the image scanning apparatus, image scanning in response to the accepting of the initiation operation, so as to generate scan data; obtaining, in the image scanning apparatus, the cloud-server login-confirmed information from the scan cloud ticket, and logging into the cloud server via the image scanning apparatus using the obtained cloud-server login-confirmed information; and uploading the scan data from the image scanning apparatus into the predetermined folder in the cloud-server storage.