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Tools / PDF Scanner

PDF Scanner

Turn a photo of a document into a straight, clean PDF.

  • No upload endpoint exists
  • No network code in any engine
  • Every tool driven in a browser each release

Choose JPG, PNG or WebP photos

or drop them here

How it works

  1. Add one photo per page, from the camera or from a file.
  2. Each page gets its corners found, straightened, and its contrast lifted. Drag the corners if the guess is off.
  3. Reorder pages, then export a PDF.

Getting a good scan from a phone photo

Almost everything that makes a scan look bad happens before you open this page. Three minutes of care with the camera beats any amount of processing afterwards.

Put the page on something that is not the same colour as it

Edge detection finds the boundary between the page and what is under it. A white form on a white desk has no boundary to find, and neither the automatic detector nor your own eye will place the corners well. A dark table, a coat, the floor: anything with contrast.

Photograph it square-on, not at an angle

Straightening a page shot from 45 degrees stretches the far end and the text there comes out soft. Stand over it. The correction is for the few degrees you cannot avoid, not for a photograph taken from a chair.

Light it from the side you are not standing on

The usual ruin is your own shadow across the middle of the page. If you can only shoot with light behind you, move the page to the edge of the surface and lean out over it.

Fill the frame, but leave a margin

The page should take up most of the picture, because detail you did not capture cannot be recovered. Leave a centimetre of desk visible on every side so the detector has an edge to lock onto.

Use Clean up for text, Original for anything with a photograph on it

Clean up stretches contrast so paper goes white and ink goes black. On a page with a photograph or a coloured stamp it will flatten what makes that image readable. Switch to Original and accept a greyer page.

Where this is the wrong tool. Browser scanning suits documents: letters, forms, invoices, contracts. For an archival photograph, a flatbed scanner still wins and it is not close, because it controls the light, sits the picture flat, and captures far more tonal range than a phone camera pointed at a curling print.

When the browser is not enough

scanmydocz for Android

Live edge detection through the camera, text recognition that makes the PDF searchable, a signature you can place, and batch capture. All of it on the phone.

In closed testing. There is no public Play link yet, so there is no button here yet.

scanmydocz Pro

Pro is the paid tier in the Android app. It cannot be bought on the web yet, because checkout is not connected, and we would rather say that than show you a price you cannot pay.

Questions

Do my files get uploaded?

No. The processing runs in this page, in your browser. There is no upload step, and there is no server here that could receive one. You can check: open your browser's network tab and run a scan.

Is there a file size limit?

None is imposed. There is no server to impose one, no account and no daily cap. The real limit is your device's memory: a phone photo is a few megabytes and dozens are fine, while a hundred at once will make the tab struggle before this page objects.

How good is the automatic edge detection?

Good on a document that contrasts with what it is lying on. Poor on a white page on a white desk, or a page shot at a steep angle. It tells you when it is not confident rather than quietly using the whole photo, and when it is wrong you drag the four corners yourself. That path is exact and always available.

Is there a big download the first time?

No. The edge finder is one small hand-written file: about fourteen kilobytes of commented JavaScript source, five over the wire. The usual way to do this is a ten-megabyte computer-vision library, which we are not going to make every visitor pay for.

Can I scan several pages into one PDF?

Yes. Add as many photos as you like, reorder them by dragging, and export once.

Does it work without a connection?

Not entirely, and it is worth being exact. Opening the page needs a connection, and so does your first export, because the PDF writer is a separate file this site hands over only when you need it. The work itself uses no network: your photo is never sent anywhere, online or not.

Is the text in the PDF searchable?

Not on the web version. The PDF holds page images. Text recognition is in the Android app.

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