Organize PDF · guide
What Scan to PDF does
Scan to PDF turns your phone or laptop camera into a document scanner. Hold a page in view and it finds the sheet, straightens it and evens out the lighting, so the shadow of your hand is not baked into the page; or choose photos you have already taken. Pick Colour, Greyscale, sharp black-and-white Text or the photo unchanged, and optionally make the text searchable. Nothing leaves your device.
How to scan to PDF in your browser
- Capture the pages Select Turn on the camera, allow access, and hold each page in view. Tap Capture page, or tick the option to capture automatically when the page is steady. To use pictures you already have, use Choose existing photos instead.
- Review each page Open any page to drag its corners onto the paper, rotate it, move it earlier or later, retake it or remove it. If the edges were missed, use Find the page again or Use the whole frame.
- Make the PDF Choose how the pages should come out, tick Make the text searchable if you need to search or copy the text, then select Make the PDF and save it.
Worked example
Create a filing copy from four photographed contract pages.
- Starting point
- Capture the pages with the camera or choose four page photos. Use even lighting and include all page edges.
- What to do
- Review the order and corners of each photo. Choose colour, grey or text treatment, and request searchable text only if needed.
- Result
- Expect one four-page PDF. Inspect signatures, small print and every cropped edge before filing.
If the result is not right
For a clipped corner, reopen the page review and adjust its four corners or choose the whole frame. Rebuild and compare against the original photo.
Limits worth knowing
- Black-and-white treatment may lose coloured annotations. OCR results need proofreading; a cleaned scan does not guarantee accurate recognition.
Questions and answers
Which finish should I choose for my scan?
Colour is the default and keeps everything, so leave it if you are unsure. Text turns each page into pure black and white, the sharpest and by far the smallest choice for typed or handwritten pages, but it turns photos and coloured logos into flat black shapes. Greyscale keeps the shading of stamps and pictures without the colour, and Photo, unchanged skips cropping, straightening and clean-up and puts the frames in exactly as taken.
The outline picked up the desk instead of the page. How do I fix the crop?
Open the page and drag its four corners onto the paper; a magnifier shows the corner hidden under your thumb, and from the keyboard the arrow keys nudge a focused corner, ten times as far with Shift held. Find the page again re-runs detection, and Use the whole frame keeps the full photo. Next time, put the sheet on a surface of a different shade from the paper, which helps detection most.
How do I scan a document with several pages into one PDF?
Keep capturing: every shot joins the list. With automatic capture ticked, the next shot is taken once you have moved to a new sheet and held it steady, so you can work through a stack without touching the screen. Put the pages in binding order with Move earlier and Move later, then Make the PDF builds them all into one file.
Can the scanned text be searched and copied?
Yes, if you tick Make the text searchable. After the pages are built, recognition runs in this tab and builds a copy in which each page is redrawn as a larger, lossless image with invisible text laid over it. The scan looks the same and can be searched and copied, but the file is usually noticeably larger, so leave the box unticked when size matters. It reads English only for now, and the recognition engine and its English data, a few megabytes, are fetched from filozy.com when it runs. If recognition fails, you still get the scan, just without searchable text.
Why can't I make the pages A4 or Letter size?
Each page keeps the shape of the sheet you photographed, so a receipt stays a long, narrow page instead of sitting in the middle of an A4 page with wide empty margins, and a page you cropped tightly is not padded back out. The shape is kept but not the paper size: the page size comes from the photo's pixels, up to about 59 cm on the long side, so a sharp phone photo of a sheet usually comes out larger than A4 and a small or low-resolution image can come out smaller. There is no setting to force a paper size, so if a form or portal demands A4, check the finished PDF against its rules.
Is the camera feed recorded or sent anywhere?
No. The camera starts only after you select Turn on the camera and your browser asks permission, and every frame is processed inside this tab. The camera is switched off when you press Turn the camera off, leave the page or switch to another tab, and nothing is kept once you leave. You can skip the camera entirely with Choose existing photos.