How to scan a document to PDF with your phone

Why a phone is enough

Few people own a flatbed scanner any more, but almost everyone carries a camera that takes 12-megapixel pictures or better. That is far more detail than a sheet of A4 needs: a page printed at office quality holds roughly 8 megapixels at 300 DPI, and anything read on a screen needs much less.

What a photo lacks is the clean look of a real scan. Pictures of paper come out grey or yellowish, with a shadow from your hand and uneven light from the room. Scan to PDF fixes that part: its Document look turns the background white, darkens the writing and removes most shadows, so a quick photo reads like something that came out of a scanner.

Students submitting handwritten assignments, people sending signed forms back to an office, and anyone applying for a visa or a job online use this every day. The whole job takes a minute or two for a few pages.

Step by step: from paper to PDF

1. Open Scan to PDF in Chrome, Safari or any modern browser on your phone.
2. Tap Take a photo. Your camera opens; photograph the first page and accept the picture.
3. Tap Add another page and repeat for every page, in order. Each photo becomes one page of the PDF.
4. Check the small previews. Use the buttons on each page to move it up or down, rotate it, or remove a bad shot and take it again.
5. Under Look, keep Document for printed or handwritten pages, or choose Original colour for colourful material.
6. Choose A4 or Letter as the page size, and set File size if you must stay under a limit.
7. Tap Create PDF, then save or share the file from your phone.

Already took the pictures? Tap Choose photos instead and pick them from your gallery - JPG, PNG and WebP work, up to 20 at a time. On a laptop or desktop, both buttons open your files, so you can also build the PDF from photos you copied over.

How to take photos that scan well

The tool doesn't crop or straighten pictures for you, so a little care at the camera saves trouble later. These habits make the biggest difference:

• Shoot from straight above. Hold the phone parallel to the paper. A tilted shot makes the page look like a trapezoid and the far lines smaller.
• Fill the frame with the page. Get close enough that the sheet fills most of the picture, with only a thin border of table around it.
• Use a dark, plain surface. A white page on a dark table has clear edges and nothing distracting behind it.
• Find even daylight. Stand near a window rather than under a single ceiling lamp, and turn off the flash - it leaves a bright glare spot in the middle.
• Watch your own shadow. If your hand or phone darkens part of the page, move so the light comes from the side.
• Hold still and let it focus. Tap the text on the screen before shooting, and check the result is sharp before moving on.

Document or Original colour?

Document is the right choice for most paperwork, and because the result is greyscale it also produces much smaller files. The previews on screen only approximate the effect; the full clean-up is applied when the PDF is made, so the final pages usually look better than the thumbnails.

Switch to Original colour when colour carries meaning - a red stamp that proves a document is genuine, a highlighted passage, a coloured chart, or a photo ID that an official will want to see as it is.

Getting under an upload limit

College systems, job portals and government websites often refuse anything above 1 or 2 MB. Ten phone photos can easily add up to 30 MB, so set a limit before you create the PDF rather than shrinking it afterwards.

Under File size, choose Under 2 MB, Under 1 MB, Under 500 KB or Under 200 KB. The tool then lowers the quality of the page images just enough to land under that size while keeping the text readable. Leave it on No limit when you plan to print the PDF.

If the limit is too strict for the number of pages, you get the smallest readable version and a message explaining that it couldn't get under the target. In that case try fewer pages per file, the Document look instead of colour, or the next larger limit if the form allows it. Compress PDF can also shrink a scan you made somewhere else.

Why scanning in the browser keeps your papers private

The documents people scan are often personal: exam answers, tax forms, bank letters, medical reports, passports. Many free scanner apps send each picture to their servers, ask for an account, or add a watermark unless you pay.

Scan to PDF works differently. The page you open contains everything needed to clean up photos and build the PDF, and that work happens on the phone itself. The photos aren't sent anywhere, there's no account, and nothing is kept once you start over or close the tab. Read how files stay private for the full picture.

After scanning: fix, combine and share

• A page is sideways or in the wrong place? Open the PDF in Organize PDF to reorder, rotate or delete pages.
• Scanned the document in two sessions? Join the two files with Merge PDF.
• Need only some of the pages? Split PDF cuts them out as a separate file.
• Already have the pages as image files? JPG to PDF turns them into a PDF without changing their colours.

Before you submit, open the finished PDF once and scroll through it. Check that every page is there, the order is right and the smallest text - dates, reference numbers, signatures - can still be read when zoomed in.