How to scan documents with your phone into a clean PDF

Before you shoot: tips for a clean result

• Put the document on a surface darker than the paper so its edges stand out and are easy to crop.
• Shooting directly under a ceiling light casts the phone’s shadow on the page. Light from the side, such as a window, works better.
• Hold the phone parallel to the paper. A photo taken at an angle makes the text lean like a trapezoid, and cropping alone cannot straighten it.
• Flatten creased paper and hold the corners down. Leave the flash off if you can; it tends to cause glare.
• Zoom into the photo straight away and check that the smallest print is readable. Retaking it on the spot is the quickest fix.

Try your phone’s built-in scanner first

On an iPhone, the document scanner in the Notes or Files app finds the page edges and corrects the angle, then saves a PDF. On Android, the scan feature in the Google Drive app, or the document mode in some camera apps, does the same. Menu names and locations vary by device and version. If you have to shoot at an angle, a scanner with this perspective correction is the better choice.

Turning photos you already took into a PDF

1. Crop the background: in Crop Image, keep only the paper. Use Rotate (90°, 180° or 270°) to stand up photos lying on their side. This tool does not straighten a page photographed at an angle.
2. Combine into a PDF: add the photos to Image to PDF and set the page order with the up and down buttons. You can add up to 30 images at a time.
3. Page settings: for one document page per photo, use Basic conversion with Page size set to A4 or Letter and Orientation set to Auto or Portrait. If the file may be printed, choose a Narrow or Normal margin rather than None. For small items such as receipts, Photo layout places 1 to 4 photos on each A4 page.
4. Reduce the size: if the PDF is over the upload limit, use Compress PDF. A PDF made from photos is image-only anyway, with no searchable text, so if Safe compression is not enough, Strong compression loses few features, though fine print can get softer. Strong compression may not be available in some browsers or for very large pages.

Limits to know

• There is no OCR, so the text in the photos does not become searchable or copyable. If you need a searchable PDF, use a scanner app or office scanner that offers OCR.
• Placing a small, distant photo on a full page does not make the text sharper. If you can, retake it closer.
• Many high-resolution photos use a lot of device memory. If your phone slows down, make the PDF in a few batches and join them with Merge PDF.

Check before you send

• Page through the whole PDF to confirm the page count, order and orientation. If pages are mixed up, see fixing scanned PDF page order and orientation.
• Zoom in on stamps, signatures and small figures in tables to make sure they are readable, and check again after compressing.
• If the documents include an ID or bank statement, consider watermarking the copy before sending it.