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How to scan documents to PDF with a phone

Photograph paper documents with your phone and turn them into a clean, legible PDF — lighting, framing, page order and file size, with a free in-browser converter.

Built-in scanners first

Your phone may already have a document scanner that crops and flattens pages: on iPhone, open Notes → paperclip/camera → Scan Documents, or the Files app → ⋯ → Scan Documents. On Android, Google Drive has Scan under the + button. If those work for you, use them.

When they don’t (a work phone without Drive, a photo someone sent you, pages you’ve already photographed), take normal photos and combine them here.

Taking photos that read well

  1. Light: daylight from a window, beside you rather than behind. Avoid the flash — it causes a hotspot glare in the middle of the page.
  2. Hold the phone flat above the page, parallel to it, so lines of text stay straight. Stand up if you need to.
  3. Dark background: a page on a dark table has clear edges.
  4. Fill the frame with the page, leaving a small border.
  5. Tap to focus on the text before shooting.

Combining the photos into one PDF

  1. Open the image to PDF converter on the phone. Tap Take a photo for each page, or Choose images to pick existing ones.
  2. Check the order — the number badge on each card is its page number.
  3. Choose A4 or US Letter so the PDF prints at normal size.
  4. For email or upload portals, pick Smaller file: pages are resized to 1,600 px and recompressed, typically a few hundred KB each.

iPhone photos in HEIC format are fine — they’re decoded on the phone. See HEIC to PDF for details.

What this approach can’t do

It won’t straighten a photo taken at an angle, remove shadows, or recognise text (OCR). For crooked or shadowy pages, retake the photo or use the built-in scanner apps above, which do perspective correction.

Questions

How big will the PDF be?

With “Smaller file”, typically 150–400 KB per page. At Original quality, roughly the size of the photos themselves — 2–4 MB per page from a modern phone.

Can I make the PDF searchable?

Not here — that needs OCR. Adobe Acrobat, Google Drive (open the PDF with Google Docs) and many scanner apps can add a text layer afterwards.