Treeet
Forms, receipts, signed contracts, school certificates: sooner or later someone asks for “a scanned copy”. You don’t need a scanner. Your phone’s camera is more than good enough, as long as you take the photos with a little care and clean them up afterwards.
This guide shows how to take good document photos and turn them into a single, tidy PDF using a free scanner that runs in your browser.
Step 1: Take good photos
The quality of the final scan depends mostly on the photos. A few minutes here save a lot of fiddling later.
Set up
- Lay the page flat on a table. Smooth out folds, and weigh down curled corners with something just outside the frame.
- Use a contrasting background. A white page on a dark table makes the edges easy to see.
- Find even light. Daylight from a window works well. Avoid a single lamp that lights one side of the page more than the other.
Shoot
- Hold the phone directly above the page, parallel to it, rather than at an angle.
- Watch for your own shadow. If the phone or your hand casts a shadow, step to the side so the light isn’t blocked.
- Keep all four corners in the frame, with a little background around the page.
- Tap to focus on the text and hold still. Zoom in on the photo afterwards to check the small print is sharp.
- Avoid flash on glossy paper; it creates a bright spot that hides text.
- Take one photo per page, in order.
Step 2: Turn the photos into a scan
Open the document scanner. It works in your phone’s browser, so you can do everything right where you took the photos. Nothing is uploaded: the images are processed on your device.
1. Add your photos
Add one photo per page. JPG, PNG and iPhone HEIC photos all work. Put them in page order; that’s the order they’ll appear in the PDF.
2. Fix the corners
For each photo, you can open the corner editor and drag the four dots onto the corners of the page. A magnifier appears while you drag, so you can place each dot precisely even under your finger. The scanner then flattens the page, correcting the angle and the slight “trapezoid” shape you get when the phone isn’t perfectly level.
A few things to know:
- Corners aren’t detected automatically. The dots start slightly inside the photo, and you move them to the page corners yourself. It only takes a few seconds per page.
- This step is optional. If you skip it, the whole photo is used as the page. That’s fine when you’ve already cropped tightly.
- “Whole picture” resets the dots to the photo’s edges.
3. Choose a look
The Look setting cleans up the page:
- Clean colour (default): whitens the paper, evens out gentle shading and boosts the contrast of the text, while keeping color. Good for documents with colored stamps, logos or signatures in blue ink.
- Greyscale: the same clean-up, without color. Good for pencil writing or mixed text and pictures.
- Black & white: pure black text on white. Good for typed forms and text-only pages, and usually gives the most “photocopied” look.
- Original: no clean-up, just straightened. Good for photos or anything where color accuracy matters.
4. Choose the output
- Save as: one PDF with all pages (default), or a JPG per page.
- PDF page size: A4 (default), US Letter, or the same size as the scan.
Most offices and online forms expect A4 or US Letter depending on the country, so pick the one that’s standard where you’re sending it.
5. Make the scan
Click Make scan and download the result. Your scanned PDF is saved with “-scan” added to the file name.
Step 3: Finish the PDF
Once you have the PDF, a few other tools help with the usual follow-up jobs.
Make it smaller
Phone photos are detailed, so multi-page scans can get big. If an email or upload form rejects the file, use Compress PDF. Its Balanced and Strong levels are well suited to scans. For a strict limit, try Compress PDF to 500 KB or to 200 KB.
Add pages from elsewhere
If you need to attach the scan to other PDFs, such as an application form you filled in on your computer, combine them with Merge PDF and set the order.
Fix a sideways page
If one page ended up rotated, Rotate PDF can turn only that page (type its number) by 90° or 180°.
Just want photos in a PDF?
If you don’t need straightening or clean-up, for example for photos of objects or screenshots, Image to PDF puts each picture on its own page as it is.
What the scanner doesn’t do
- No text recognition (OCR). The pages in your PDF are images, so you can’t select, search or copy the text. If you need searchable text, you’ll need a separate OCR tool.
- No automatic edge detection. You set the corners yourself, as described above.
- No automatic page splitting. If you photograph two pages of a book at once, you get one image with both pages. Take one photo per page instead.
Troubleshooting
The text looks blurry
The scanner can’t add detail that isn’t in the photo. Retake it with steadier hands, better light and the phone a little closer, and check sharpness before you move on.
The page looks gray or patchy
Uneven light is usually the cause. Move to a spot with more even light, or try the Greyscale or Black & white look.
The edges look warped
Check that each corner dot sits exactly on the page corner, not on a shadow or the table. Curled or folded pages can’t be fully flattened, so smooth them out before you shoot.
The page is cut off
One of the corners was probably outside the photo. Retake it with some background showing on all four sides.
A private alternative to scanning apps
Documents you scan are often personal: IDs, bank letters, medical forms, contracts. With this scanner, the photos are processed on your own phone or computer and aren’t uploaded to Treeet. There’s no app to install and no account to create, and the result is a standard PDF you can send anywhere.