How to Scan Documents to PDF With Your Phone Camera

Set up: light, surface and background

Good scans are mostly about light. Daylight from a window, or a ceiling lamp that is not directly above you, gives even illumination. Avoid the phone's flash on glossy paper, since it creates a bright hotspot, and watch for your own shadow: if you lean over the page with a lamp behind you, half the page turns grey.

Put the paper flat on a dark, plain surface. A dark table makes the white page stand out and makes it obvious where the edges are. Our tool does not detect or crop page edges automatically, so the contrast between page and background, plus filling the frame with the page, is what gives you a tidy result. Smooth out folds; a creased letter can be weighed down at the corners with a couple of coins outside the area you photograph.

Take the photo: angle, distance and focus

Hold the phone straight above the page, parallel to it. A tilted angle turns the rectangle into a trapezoid with a big top and a small bottom, and the far lines get blurry. Move close enough that the page fills most of the screen with only a thin border of table around it.

Tap the screen on the text to focus before you shoot, and hold still for a moment. For small print, such as receipts or the back of an insurance card, we take two photos and keep the sharper one. It costs five seconds and saves a resend.

• Straight above the page, not at an angle.
• Page fills the frame, with a thin dark border around it.
• Even light, no flash on glossy paper, no shadow from your hand or head.
• Tap to focus on the text, then hold still.

How to scan to PDF with pdfdots, step by step

Scan to PDF runs in your browser: photos are processed on your device and are never uploaded to us. You need a free account. The free plan includes 3 tasks a day for files up to 10 MB, and the paid Bronze, Silver and Gold plans raise those limits.

• 1. Open Scan to PDF on your phone and tap Take photo to open the camera. On a computer, choose image files instead, for example photos you took earlier.
• 2. Photograph the first page from straight above, then add each following page in order. There is no fixed page limit.
• 3. Turn on document mode if the pages are mostly text. It raises contrast and converts to grayscale for crisp dark text on a light background.
• 4. Leave document mode off for color documents, photos, or anything where a colored stamp or signature matters.
• 5. Tap Create PDF. All pages are placed on A4 sheets and saved together as one PDF.

After scanning: make it searchable with OCR

A phone scan is a set of pictures inside a PDF. It looks like text, but there is no text layer, so you cannot search it, copy a sentence out of it or have a screen reader read it aloud. Some portals and many document management systems expect searchable PDFs.

To add a text layer, run the finished file through OCR PDF. It recognizes the text in the images and adds an invisible, searchable layer behind them, while the page still looks like your scan. The cleaner the original photo, the better OCR works, which is one more reason to take care with light and angle. Document mode usually helps OCR too, because it increases the contrast between text and paper.

Shrink it for email and upload portals

Phone cameras produce large images, and ten pages can easily add up to a file that a job portal or a government form will refuse. Document mode already reduces the size somewhat, because grayscale images are smaller than color ones. If the file is still too big, Compress PDF brings it down further while keeping text readable.

Our order is: scan, check, OCR if needed, compress last. Compressing before OCR can soften the text and make recognition less accurate. And if a page came out wrong or in the wrong order, fix it with Organize PDF before anything else rather than rescanning the whole stack.

Receipts, IDs and other awkward documents

Long receipts curl and are often printed on thermal paper that fades. We flatten them under two books for a minute, photograph them in sections if they are very long, and turn on document mode to recover faint print. Since thermal print fades over months, scanning receipts on the day you get them is the best habit for expense claims.

For ID cards, photograph the front and the back as two pages of the same PDF, and leave document mode off if the recipient needs to see colors such as a hologram or photo. Before sending an ID copy to a landlord or agency, we add a purpose line with Add Watermark, which makes the copy much less useful if it ends up in the wrong hands.

Frequently asked questions