A scanner you already own
Somebody asks for a signed form, a receipt or a copy of a document as a single PDF, and there is no scanner in the house. The phone in your pocket takes a better picture than most flatbeds did ten years ago; what is missing is the part that turns several photographs into one document. This does that in the browser: open the camera, photograph each page, and bind them into one PDF in order.
The camera stream and every photograph stay on your device. Nothing is uploaded, no app is installed, and there is no account — which is worth something given that the documents people scan are usually identity papers, bank forms and contracts, and the free scanner apps that ask for an account are asking for exactly those.
Two ways in
- The camera. The browser asks permission, then shows a live view with a capture button. It prefers the rear camera, which is the sharp one. Permission is per site and can be withdrawn at any time.
- The file picker. Choose photographs you have already taken — and on a phone, the picker offers the camera as one of its options, which is the simpler route if the live view is refused or unavailable.
Camera access needs a secure connection and an explicit grant, and most desktop computers have either no camera or a poor one facing the wrong way. If the live view will not open, the tool says why and the picker is always there.
Getting a page that looks scanned
The difference between a photograph of a document and something that passes as a scan is mostly lighting and angle, neither of which software can fully repair:
- Flat, even light. Daylight near a window beats a ceiling light directly overhead, which casts your own shadow across the page.
- Straight down. Hold the phone parallel to the paper. Shooting at an angle makes the page a trapezoid, and no amount of cropping squares it up.
- Fill the frame with the page, leaving a small margin. Detail you did not capture cannot be recovered later.
- Dark, plain surface under white paper. It helps the camera expose correctly and makes the edges obvious.
- Tap to focus before capturing, and check the result before moving on — a blurred page is only obvious at full size.
- No flash. It produces a bright blown-out patch in the middle and hard shadows at the edges.
Page size and greyscale
| Setting | What it does | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| A4 or US Letter | Centres the photo on a standard page with a margin | The document will be printed, filed or sent to an office |
| Fit the page to the photo | Each page is exactly the size of its picture | Receipts, ID cards, anything not a standard sheet |
| Greyscale | Drops colour and lifts contrast slightly | Black text on paper — smaller files and cleaner-looking pages |
Greyscale typically halves the file size and makes an unevenly lit page look more like a scan. Keep colour when colour carries meaning: stamps, highlighted clauses, coloured signatures, photographs of cards.
What to do next
- The pages are photographs, so the text is not searchable. Run the result through OCR PDF if you need to search or copy from it.
- Phone photos are large. A ten-page scan can easily exceed an upload limit; Compress PDF at 150 dpi usually cuts it dramatically with no visible loss.
- Check the order before building the PDF. Pages are numbered in the strip as you add them and any one can be removed.
- Strip the metadata with Remove PDF Metadata if the file is going outside your organisation.
- For a signature, consider signing the PDF directly with Sign PDF instead — the result is cleaner than photographing a signed printout.