How to scan paper documents to PDF with your phone

You do not need a scanner

A modern phone camera is sharper than most office scanners were a few years ago. With a bit of care, a photo of a document is perfectly readable for applications, insurance claims, expense reports and anything else that asks for a PDF.

The trick is to take good photos first and then combine them into one PDF in the right order.

Taking photos that read well

Put the paper on a dark, plain surface so the edges stand out. Use daylight from a window or a ceiling light, and avoid the flash, which causes a bright spot in the middle of the page.

Hold the phone straight above the page, not at an angle, so the lines of text stay parallel. Fill most of the frame with the page but leave a little space around it so no edge is cut off.

Tap the screen on the text to focus, hold still and take the photo. Zoom in on the result and check that the smallest text is sharp before moving to the next page.

Combining the photos into one PDF

Open the image to PDF tool on your phone or computer and choose the photos. On a phone, the file picker lets you pick photos from your gallery. Each image becomes one page, in the order you selected them.

Check the order in the preview, then download the PDF. The images are converted in your browser and are not uploaded anywhere, which is a good idea for documents such as pay slips, ID cards and medical letters.

If you forgot a page, convert that photo too and merge the two PDFs. A page that came out sideways can be rotated in the editor.

Keeping the file small enough to send

Phone photos are large. A ten-page document can easily become 30 MB, which is too big for many email services and upload forms.

Run the finished PDF through the compressor. For photographed text it usually shrinks the file to a fraction of the size while the text stays readable. Compare the result on screen before you send it.

Make the text searchable

A photo of a page is just an image, so you cannot search it or copy text from it. If you will need to find something in the document later, run it through OCR, which recognises the text and adds an invisible text layer on top of the images.