Scan to PDF
Use your phone camera or drop in photos of documents, then clean them up — straighten, boost contrast, drop to black and white — and save the lot as a proper scanned-looking PDF.
Drop your file here
or click to browse
Turn this up if the paper still looks grey.
- ProcessingOn your device
- Uploaded to a serverNothing
- InternetNot needed
Don't take our word for it. Turn off your Wi‑Fi, then use this tool. It will work exactly the same, which is only possible because your file never goes anywhere.
Turning your phone camera into a scanner
A photograph of a document and a scan of one are the same thing captured differently. What separates them is framing, lighting and contrast — and those you can control without any hardware at all.
Getting a clean capture
- Use indirect daylight. Overhead light puts your own shadow across the page; direct sun blows out the white.
- Shoot straight down, not at an angle. A page photographed from the side comes out as a trapezium.
- Fill the frame with the page and leave a small margin, rather than cropping tight and losing an edge.
- Put the document on a dark surface. The contrast makes the page edges obvious.
- Hold still. Blur is the one problem no amount of processing recovers from.
Why a PDF rather than photos
One file instead of six attachments, in a fixed page order, that opens the same way everywhere and prints predictably. Most organisations that ask for a scanned document will not accept a folder of photographs, and many upload forms take nothing but PDF.
It is still a picture
A scan holds an image of text, not text. It cannot be searched, and copying a line out of it is not possible until the words are recognised by OCR. If you need to search or quote the content, that is a separate step — and it is worth knowing before you scan a hundred pages.
Related reading: why scans are so large, and how to shrink them, and keeping scanned ID and bank letters private.
Questions people ask
Do I need to install a scanner app?
No. On a phone the file picker offers your camera directly, so you can shoot straight into the tool.
How many pages can I scan into one document?
As many as your device's memory allows, which in practice is a lot. Very long scans are easier to handle in batches.
Will the scan be searchable?
No. It is an image of text. Searching requires OCR, which recognises the shapes as characters.
Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?
No. The images are assembled into a PDF in your browser, on your device. That matters for the ID documents and bank letters people most often scan.
How to use it
How-to guides · 9 August 2026 · 3 min
How to scan a document properly with your phone
A photograph and a scan are the same capture done differently. Lighting, angle and framing are what separate them — and why your council rejected the last one.
How-to guides · 21 August 2026 · 7 min
How to make a scanned PDF searchable
Ctrl+F finds nothing because your document is a picture of words rather than words. OCR fixes that by adding an invisible text layer — without changing a single pixel of how the scan looks.