An image input system prevents excessive load from being placed on a network when using an image input device via the network. When an application, such as an optical character recognition (OCR) application, running on a client computer is to utilize an image scanned by a scanner connected over the network, and when the application has designated a batch transfer mode as an image transfer mode, modules of the client computer virtually acquire the scanned image in the batch transfer mode and transfer the image to the application.