Document scanner
photo to clean scan

How to scan documents with your phone

1. Take a photo of each page, from above and in good light.
2. Choose the photos or drop them on the page. Put them in order with the up and down arrows; the top photo becomes page 1.
3. Press Adjust corners on each photo and drag the four dots onto the page’s corners. A magnifier appears while you drag. If you skip this, the whole photo is used.
4. Pick the Look, the output and the PDF page size in the settings panel.
5. Press Make scan, then Download.

What the settings do

• Look: Clean colour (the default) evens out the paper color, removes shadows and boosts contrast while keeping colors. Greyscale does the same in shades of grey. Black & white turns every pixel black or white, which gives crisp text and small files but makes photos and stamps look blotchy. Original keeps the photo as it is.
• Save as: One PDF (all pages), or a JPG per page.
• PDF page size: A4, US Letter, or Same as the scan. A4 and Letter pages have a small white margin; Same as the scan fits the page to the scan, which suits receipts and odd-sized papers.

What it doesn’t do

• It doesn’t find the page edges automatically. You set the corners yourself, and it then straightens the page.
• It doesn’t recognize text (OCR). The PDF contains pictures of the pages, so you can’t search or copy the text.
• Black & white can lose very faint pencil or light-colored ink. Use Greyscale or Clean colour for those.

Tips for a clean scan

• Lay the page on a dark, plain surface so the edges are easy to see.
• Avoid your own shadow: stand with the light in front of you or to the side.
• Turn the flash off on glossy paper to avoid glare.
• Fill most of the frame with the page; the more pixels the page has, the sharper the scan.
• Hold the phone parallel to the page. Setting the corners corrects a tilt, but a straight shot keeps text evenly sharp from top to bottom.
• For several pages, take all the photos first, then add them together and order them in one go.

Common problems and fixes

• “The four corners don’t make a page shape”: drag each dot onto a different corner of the page.
• The page looks stretched: one dot is off its corner. Press Adjust corners and use the magnifier to place it exactly.
• The PDF is too big: run it through Compress PDF, or choose Black & white for text-only pages.
• Pages are in the wrong order: move them with the arrows and press the button again.

Privacy

Leases, medical forms and tax papers stay on your device. Straightening, cleaning and building the PDF all happen in your browser.