How to Scan a Document with Your Phone and Send It as a PDF
Need to send a signed form, a receipt or a certificate, and there's no scanner at home? Your phone is all you need. This guide explains how to photograph a document so it looks like a real scan, and how to turn the photos into a single PDF.
Why not just send the photo?
You can, and sometimes that's enough. But in most cases a PDF is better:
- Many upload forms, from government offices, health providers, insurers and employers, only accept PDF.
- A multi-page document stays one tidy file instead of five images arriving in random order.
- An A4 PDF prints like a normal document, without black margins or cropping.
How to take the photo
The difference between an amateur-looking photo and a clean scan is mostly in how you shoot:
- A dark, flat surface. A white page on a dark table gives clear edges that are easy to crop.
- Natural light, no flash. Flash creates a bright spot in the middle of the page. Next to a window in daylight is ideal.
- Straight from above. Hold the phone parallel to the page. Shooting at an angle turns the page into a trapezoid and blurs the text on the far side.
- No shadow from your hand or phone. If there is one, move so the light comes from the side.
- The whole page in the frame. Better to leave a margin and crop later than to cut off a corner of the text.
Crop and straighten
Before converting, open each photo in your phone's gallery and crop it to the edges of the page. Both iPhone and Android have a built-in crop and straighten tool in the photo editor, which also fixes a page that came out crooked.
Using the phone's built-in scanner
Most phones can also scan straight to PDF, cropping and straightening the page for you:
- iPhone: in the Files app, tap the ⋯ button and choose Scan Documents. Hold the phone over the page and it captures automatically. Add more pages, tap Save, and you get a PDF in Files. The Notes app has the same option under the camera or paperclip icon.
- Android: in the Google Drive app, tap the + button and choose Scan. Each page is cropped automatically, and the result is saved to Drive as a PDF. On many Samsung and Pixel phones the camera app also offers a scan button when it sees a document.
If your phone doesn't have this, a regular photo cropped by hand, as above, works just as well.
Turn it into a PDF
- Open JPG to PDF, right from your phone.
- Select all the photos of the document.
- Put them in page order with Move up.
- Choose A4 as the page size and download.
For two-sided documents like an ID card, photograph both sides and put them in the same file, front first.
File too large?
A photo from a recent phone can weigh several megabytes, so a five-page document can exceed an upload limit. Run the PDF through Compress PDF. Medium is almost always right, and the text stays readable.
Want the text to be searchable?
A PDF made from photos is still an image: you can't copy text from it or search it. If that matters, for example for a document archive, run the file through OCR and choose the Searchable PDF output.
Sensitive documents
If you're sending a photo of an ID card, driver's license or credit card, it's worth one more minute. The guide to sending an ID copy safely explains how to add a watermark that limits what the copy can be used for.