Scan to PDF with your camera
Photograph a document with your camera and get a clean, flat PDF.
Your camera stays on this device. No photo is ever uploaded.
Your phone is the scanner you already own
Point the camera at a page, take a photo, and get back something that looks scanned rather than photographed. Take several and they become one multi-page PDF, in the order you choose.
It works on a laptop webcam too, and if there is no camera — or you would rather not grant permission — you can pick photos you have already taken and get exactly the same processing.
What "document mode" actually does
The problem with photographing paper is never focus; it is light. There is a shadow from your own hand, a bright patch near the window, a gradient across the page. Simply raising the contrast keeps the gradient, and simple thresholding destroys the shadowed half.
So the lighting is estimated and divided out. A heavily downscaled copy of the photo is, in effect, a map of the illumination — at that scale the letters disappear and only the light remains. Dividing the original by that map flattens the page, and a contrast stretch then puts the paper at white and the ink at black.
The result is the flat, even, high-contrast look of a real scanner, from a hand-held phone photo under a desk lamp.
Greyscale converts without flattening, for pages where the shading matters. Colour leaves the photo alone — right for anything with a photograph, a coloured stamp or a signature in blue ink you want to stay blue.
Getting a good scan
- Shoot straight down. The guide frame shows what will be captured.
- Fill the frame with the page — the desk around it is wasted resolution.
- Avoid your own shadow. Light from the side beats light from behind you.
- On a phone, rest your elbows on the table. Almost every unusable scan is motion blur.
Nothing is uploaded
The camera stream is rendered to a canvas, processed and turned into a PDF entirely inside the browser. No frame is transmitted, which is the only sensible arrangement for a tool people point at passports, bank statements and exam forms.
Afterwards
Scans are images, so the PDF is not searchable. OCR it to add a text layer, or compress it to an exact size if a portal has given you a limit.
Common questions
Does my photo get uploaded?
No. The camera stream is processed in your browser and the PDF is built there. No frame is transmitted.
Why does the scan look better than the photo?
Document mode estimates the lighting across the page and divides it out, which removes shadows and gradients before raising the contrast.
Can I use it on a laptop?
Yes, with a webcam, or by choosing photos you already have. The processing is identical.
Can I scan more than one page?
Yes. Take as many as you need, reorder or delete any of them, and they become one PDF.
Will the PDF be searchable?
Not on its own — a scan is images. Run it through OCR PDF afterwards to add a text layer.
Why does changing the mode not update my pages?
Processing is applied when the photo is taken, and the untouched original is not kept. The new setting applies to the next photo.