How to scan a document with your phone without installing anything

The photo is 90% of the result

A bad scan cannot be fixed afterwards. Thirty seconds spent shooting it properly is worth it:

• Light from the side, never head-on. Flash bounces off the paper and burns out the middle of the page. Next to a window works far better.
• Watch your own shadow. It is the commonest mistake: you lean over the paper and block the light. Stand to one side.
• Phone parallel to the paper, not at an angle. Tilt it and the text comes out as a trapezoid.
• Dark, plain background. White paper on a dark table makes the edges clear.
• Fill the frame with the sheet, without cutting off the corners.

Assembling the photos into a PDF

A4 is the right call here: a scanned document usually gets printed or sent to an office, and with every page the same size it looks like a real scan.

Making the text searchable

The PDF you just made is, on the inside, a pile of photos. It looks fine, but you cannot search for a word inside it or copy a paragraph.

That is what text recognition (OCR) is for: it reads the images and works out which letters are there. Run the PDF through the OCR tool and you get the text extracted, ready to copy or search.

If the PDF is too heavy

Ten photos from a modern phone can add up to twenty or thirty megabytes, and many mail servers stop at twenty-five. Run it through the compress PDF tool: on scanned documents it drops by 60% to 90% and stays perfectly readable.

Why not use a scanner app

You can, and some work well. But nearly all of them ask for full access to your gallery, many upload the documents to their servers to process them, and plenty add a watermark or charge to remove it.

Here there is nothing to install and your files are never uploaded to a server. For an ID card, a payslip or a contract, that difference matters.