Document scanner from a photo

How the photo document scanner works

Take a picture of the paper with your phone, even at an angle from your chair, and upload it here. The tool finds the corners of the page, straightens the photo into a rectangle and cleans it up so it looks like it came out of a flatbed scanner: white paper, black text, no shadow of your hand and no grey desk around it. Download the result as a PDF or a JPG.

• Page corners are guessed automatically. If the guess is off, drag the circles onto the real corners of the paper, or use Whole photo to keep the entire frame.
• Black and white (document) is the default look for printed text and forms. Greyscale suits documents with stamps and photos, colour leaves the photo as it is and only straightens it.
• PDF page size: matching the photo keeps the paper's aspect ratio, A4 places the page on a standard sheet, which printers and offices prefer.
• Several pages: upload multiple photos at once, arrange them with the arrows and download a single PDF.

How to photograph a document so the scan is legible

Even lighting helps the most. Shoot next to a window or under a ceiling light, not with the flash, which leaves a glossy spot in the middle of the page. Put the paper on a darker surface; the tool finds it far more easily on a dark desk than on a white one. Hold the phone as parallel to the paper as you can and leave a little room around the page so all four corners are in the frame. A blurry photo cannot be fixed by any cleanup, take it again.

Frequently asked questions

Do you upload the photos to a server?

No. Straightening, cleanup and the PDF itself are all done in your browser. Photos of a contract or an ID card never leave your device.

Does it handle HEIC photos from an iPhone?

Yes. HEIC and HEIF files are converted in the browser before processing; the converter loads with the first such file. Besides those we accept JPG, PNG and WebP.

How many pages can I scan at once?

Up to 30. Each photo is one page and the order in the list is the order in the PDF. Split a longer document into two batches and merge the two PDFs with the PDF merge tool.

Why is black and white the default?

Printed text is most legible in black and white and the file is smallest. The threshold follows the brightness around each pixel, so a shadow across half the page does not turn black the way it would with a plain two-colour conversion. For stamps, signatures in blue ink or photos inside the document switch to greyscale or colour.

What resolution does the result have?

The longer side of the page is at most 2,500 pixels, which for A4 is roughly 200 DPI. That is enough for reading, printing and sending to an office, and a ten-page PDF usually weighs just a few megabytes. The JPG quality slider controls the trade-off.

Can I extract the text from a scanned page?

A scan is an image, so its text cannot be selected or searched. Download it and upload it to the Image to text (OCR)tool, which reads text from a straightened black-and-white page more reliably than from the original photo.