Scan documents to PDF with your phone or webcam
This free online document scanner turns photos of paper into a clean, straight PDF. Capture pages with your phone’s rear camera or a webcam, or upload photos you have already taken. Each page is cropped to its four corners and flattened with a perspective correction, so a sheet photographed at an angle comes out rectangular, as if it had gone through a flatbed scanner.
Filters then make the scan readable and compact: Enhanced whitens the paper and deepens the ink, Grayscale removes colour, and B&W uses adaptive thresholding to produce crisp black text even when the lighting was uneven. Put the pages in order, choose A4 or US Letter and download one PDF.
There is nothing to install and nothing is uploaded: the camera feed and your photos are processed entirely in your browser, which matters for ID cards, bank documents, prescriptions and signed forms.
How to scan a document to PDF
- Choose Camera and press Start camera (allow access when asked), or choose Upload photos and add pictures of your pages.
- Place the page on a darker surface, fill the frame and press Capture page for each page. The edges are detected automatically when the page stands out from the background.
- Tap a page to check it: drag the four round handles onto the corners of the paper if needed, or press Auto-detect or Whole photo.
- Pick a filter — Enhanced, Grayscale or B&W — rotate the page if it is sideways, and use the arrows under the thumbnails to fix the order.
- Choose the page size, margin, resolution and JPEG quality, then press Create PDF.
Scan to PDF features
Real perspective correction
A homography maps the four corners you set onto a rectangle and every pixel is resampled, removing the keystone effect of an angled photo.
Automatic edge detection
The brightest connected region in the photo is found and its corners proposed, so most pages need no manual adjustment.
Readable filters
Enhanced levels, grayscale, and a Bradley–Roth adaptive black-and-white filter that handles shadows far better than a single threshold.
Camera or photos
Use the rear camera live, pick between several cameras, or upload JPG, PNG and WebP photos taken earlier.
Small files
Choose 150, 200 or 300 DPI and the JPEG quality; black-and-white pages are stored as PNG automatically when that is smaller.
Private
Frames and photos never leave your device, and nothing is saved after you close the page.
Tips for a clean scan
- Contrast helps. White paper on a dark table, floor or folder lets auto-detect find the edges reliably.
- Even light, no shadows. Daylight from a window or two lamps works best; hold the phone so its shadow doesn’t fall across the page.
- Fill the frame and hold steady. More pixels on the paper means sharper text. Tap the screen to focus before capturing if your phone allows.
- Keep the phone roughly parallel. The perspective correction removes tilt, but extreme angles stretch the far edge and soften it.
- Use B&W for text, Enhanced for colour. Forms and letters are smallest and clearest in B&W; keep Enhanced for stamps, photos and coloured highlights.
Which resolution and size should I choose?
Higher resolution gives sharper small print but bigger files. The sizes below are rough guides — they depend on how much is on the page and on your camera. A portal that demands a file “under 1 MB” is usually satisfied by 150–200 DPI. To make the scanned text searchable or copyable afterwards, run the PDF through PDF OCR or Make PDF Searchable.
| Setting | Best for | Typical size per page |
|---|---|---|
| 150 DPI, quality 60–70% | Email attachments and online forms with size limits | 100–300 KB |
| 200 DPI, quality 75% (default) | Everyday documents, receipts, school work | 200–500 KB |
| 300 DPI, quality 85%+ | Archiving, small print, OCR | 500 KB–1.5 MB |
| B&W filter at any DPI | Text-only pages | Often the smallest option |
Scanner app, photo or this tool?
A plain photo of a document is skewed, includes the table around it and is often several megabytes. Dedicated scanner apps fix that but usually require an install and an account, and some upload your pages to the cloud. This page does the same job — crop, straighten, clean up, combine — inside the browser. If your images are already straight and cropped, JPG to PDF is quicker; to join several scanned PDFs together, use Merge PDF.
Scan to PDF FAQ
How do I scan a document to PDF with my phone?
Open this page on your phone, choose Camera and press Start camera. Capture each page, check the corners, choose a filter and press Create PDF. The PDF downloads to your phone, ready to share.
Is this document scanner free and private?
Yes. It is free with no sign-up or watermark, and the camera feed and photos are processed only in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Why doesn’t the camera start?
Your browser needs permission to use the camera; allow it from the camera icon in the address bar. On iPhone use Safari or Chrome over https. If the camera is busy in another app, close that app first. You can always upload photos instead.
Can I scan multiple pages into one PDF?
Yes. Capture or upload as many pages as you need, reorder them with the arrows, remove any you don’t want, and they are all saved in one PDF.
What does the B&W filter do?
It converts the page to pure black and white using an adaptive threshold that compares every pixel with its surroundings. That keeps text sharp even with shadows or uneven light, and makes files smaller.
Does it make the text searchable?
Not by itself — the pages are images. Run the finished PDF through PDF OCR or Make PDF Searchable to add a selectable, searchable text layer.