A contract, a receipt, a signed page: Often, you need to send a sheet of paper as a PDF quickly, and the scanner is at the office or no longer in the house at all. Your phone has been able to do this for a long time, without installing a scanner app. Here’s how it works on iPhone and Android, what matters when taking photos, and how to make the scan clean, straight, and small.
Scan without an app: how it works in the browser
Open the Scan PDF tool on your phone and tap “Open camera.” Hold the sheet in view: A frame appears around the paper, and as soon as it stays still for a moment, the page is captured automatically. You do not need to press the shutter, crop it, or straighten anything. Just hold the next sheet in view again. At the end, tap “Done,” choose a filter, and save the PDF.
Everything happens on your phone itself. The photos are not uploaded, there is no account, and no installation. This differs from most scanner apps, which want a subscription or upload your scans to their own servers.
From your computer: scan a QR code, take photos with your phone, receive the PDF
If you are sitting at your computer and the sheet is next to you, open the same page there and choose “Scan with your phone.” A QR code appears. Point your phone’s camera app at it, tap the link, photograph the pages, and save. The finished PDF then appears on your computer, with no email to yourself and no cable. For this, the file is stored briefly, for no more than 30 minutes, on our server and is then deleted.
What matters when taking photos
- Background: Place the sheet on a dark, solid-colored surface. On a white table, detection has more difficulty finding the edges.
- Light: Daylight from the side or a lamp from above. If the lamp is behind you, your phone casts a shadow on the sheet; the “Document” filter can remove this, but the result is sharper without shadows.
- Distance: The sheet should be large in the image, with a little margin around it. The more pixels that land on the paper, the easier small print is to read.
- Hold still: The capture happens as soon as the frame stays still. With both hands and your elbows supported, this takes one second.
Which filter to use for what
Document is the default: Shadows and yellowish light are removed, the paper becomes white, and stamps and signatures keep their color. Black and white is the sharpest and smallest version for plain text, but photos and areas of color are lost. Grayscale falls in between, for example for forms with gray fields. Original leaves the photo as it is, only cropped and straightened.
Multiple pages, wrong order, crooked frame
Up to 50 pages fit in one session. In the overview, you can rotate, remove, or move each page using the arrows. If the frame is off, for example because the sheet was on a patterned tablecloth, tap the page and drag the four corners manually to the right place.
Make the scan searchable
A scan is initially an image: You can read it, but you cannot search within it or copy text from it. After saving, the page offers text recognition. After that, you can select and copy the text, and ask questions using “Chat with PDF.” If you send the scan to a government agency or insurance company, you should include this; many offices process documents automatically today.
What about the built-in scanning feature on iPhone and Android?
iPhone can scan in the Notes app, and Android can scan in Google Drive. Both work, but they have two drawbacks: The result first ends up in the respective app and has to be shared from there, and the files are often unnecessarily large. The browser route delivers the PDF directly, with a filter and in a size that fits through any inbox. If you want to make the result even smaller, use Compress PDF afterward.