Document Scanner — Photos to Clean PDF
Scan paper with a phone camera and get back a straight, readable multi-page PDF: auto edge detection, per-page looks, a stain eraser, optional searchable text.
Drag & drop or paste an image here, or
Take a photo of each page, or add pictures you already have. Add several — they become one PDF.
Copies this page's look, brightness, contrast and flatten & straighten to every page. Rotation stays per page.
Document
Adds an invisible, selectable text layer so you can search and copy from the PDF.
How to use
- Press Take photo and shoot each page flat under even light, or drag in pictures the phone already took. Every shot joins the filmstrip as its own page, and Retake swaps a blurry one into the same slot.
- Open the Crop tab and look at the four corners on the big preview. Drag a handle onto the real edge, with a magnifier floating clear of your fingertip, or press Auto-detect edges to try again. Use whole photo starts from the full frame.
- Leave Flatten & straighten switched on unless you want the photo exactly as shot. It squares the corners and takes out a tilt of up to about seven degrees, then reports the angle it removed.
- Move to the Look tab, pick a chip, nudge Brightness and Contrast, rotate a sideways shot. When one page is right, Apply to all pages carries it to the rest.
- Brush over stains, creases or handwriting on the Clean up tab and press Erase selected. Undo erase puts any fill back.
- Drag the thumbnails into order, set page size and layout, tick Make the text searchable (OCR) if you need it, then Create PDF and Download PDF. Download JPGs gives you the cleaned pages as images instead.
About this tool
Paper still piles up. A signed lease, a fistful of receipts, the medical form the clinic wants emailed back today. The best document scanner most people own is the phone in their pocket, and the missing piece has always been the bit that turns a tilted snapshot of a page into something that looks scanned. Shoot the page and the tool finds its four corners, pulls the perspective flat, and levels the small tilt every hand-held shot carries. Each capture becomes one page in the filmstrip below the preview, up to thirty of them in a batch.
Pages land on the Auto look, which lifts a dim photo and evens out its contrast while leaving a well-lit one alone. Original, Grayscale and Magic color sit next to it, with Brightness, Contrast and rotation stacking on top, all held per page. Once a page looks right, Apply to all pages copies that treatment across the batch and leaves everyone's rotation alone. The Clean up tab hands you a brush: paint over a coffee ring or a stray scribble, press Erase selected, and a 30 MB inpainting model that downloads once repaints the area from the paper around it.
Export is where the small decisions live. A4 is the default page size, with US Letter and Fit to scan a select away, and the Continuous layout stacks several small scans down one page without ever splitting a photo across a break. Tick Make the text searchable, choose the document language, and every page gets an invisible OCR layer you can select, copy and search while the page still looks like a scan. When a portal caps uploads, type the number into Target size in KB and the encoder steps the quality down until it fits.
Good to know
- Auto edge detection needs the page to stand out from whatever is behind it, so a white sheet on a pale desk or a receipt on marble can defeat it. The four handles are always yours to drag, and the corners you set are the corners it uses. A curved book spine stays curved whichever corners you pick, because flattening assumes the page is flat.
Frequently asked questions
Can this replace CamScanner or Adobe Scan?
For the everyday job of getting paper into a tidy PDF, yes. You get the same core flow of edge detection, flattening, per-page enhancement and a multi-page export, with no app to install and no watermark stamped across the result. What it does not have is cloud sync or a shared team folder, because the only copy of a scan is the file you download.
The edges came out wrong. Can I set the crop by hand?
Open the Crop tab and drag any corner handle onto the real edge of the page. A round magnifier floats above your finger so your hand never covers the spot you are aiming at, and arrow keys nudge a focused corner one pixel at a time. Use whole photo resets to the full frame, and switching off Flatten & straighten keeps your corners while skipping the geometry correction.
Which languages can the searchable text layer read?
Printed English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese, picked from the Document language select before you build the PDF. Handwriting is not recognised in any of them, and a script outside that list comes through as an image on the page rather than as text you can search.
Can I force the PDF under a hard size limit, like 200 KB?
Type 200 into Target size (KB) before pressing Create PDF and the encoder tries progressively stronger compression, keeping the smallest result that still fits. A dense colour page only squeezes so far, and if the target proves unreachable it reports the closest size it managed rather than wrecking the pages. For reference, each page renders at up to 3508 pixels on the long side, roughly 300 DPI for A4, and Download JPGs always exports at full quality.
Can I drop a bad page or move one earlier without starting over?
The filmstrip is where that happens. Drag a thumbnail to a new slot, or focus one and hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) while you press an arrow key to shift it a single place, with Home and End sending it to the front or the back. The small x on a tile deletes that page, and Delete or Backspace does the same job from the keyboard. Tiles renumber after every change, so what the strip shows is the page order you get.
My phone saves photos as HEIC. Will those open here?
They will. A .heic or .heif file is turned into a JPEG before anything else touches it, and from there it behaves like any photo out of any camera. The decoder is fetched the first time one of them turns up, so that first page takes a moment longer than the pages after it.
High, Balanced or Small under PDF quality. What am I trading?
JPEG quality on every page, at 90, 75 and 55 in that order. High holds small print together on a dense page and costs the most bytes. Small is plenty for a receipt that only has to stay legible. Fill in Target size as well and the search takes over, re-encoding the pages between 90 and 20 until the PDF fits, which is a reason to start from High if you plan to use both.
Can I put four receipts on one page instead of four pages?
Set Layout to Continuous. Scans stack down the sheet with a gap between them, a fresh sheet starts once the current one fills, and a scan too tall for the space gets a sheet of its own instead of being cut in half. Layout does switch off while Page size is Fit to scan, because that setting already hands every scan a page shaped to it.
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