Scan documents with your phone, without installing an app
Updated October 31, 2026
A contract to send back today, a form the school wants "scanned", three pages of a signed agreement: the phone is the only scanner you have, and the scanner apps in the store want an account, a subscription or your contacts before they give you a PDF without a watermark. A browser page can do the same job: find the page in the camera picture, straighten it, clean it and save a PDF, with nothing leaving the phone.
This guide walks through a scan with Scan to PDF from the first picture to the saved file, and says plainly what the tool does not do yet.
1. Set the page up
Put the page on a surface that contrasts with it: a white sheet on a dark table is found instantly; a white sheet on a white desk is not, and you will place the corners yourself. Daylight from a window is better than the ceiling lamp, which puts your own shadow across the text. Smooth the page with your hand first; the detector wants four corners it can see.
Open the tool and tap Scan with camera. The browser asks for the camera once; if you refuse, or the phone has no camera, Choose photos opens the gallery and the same processing applies to pictures you have already taken.
2. Take the pictures
A green outline follows the page in the live picture. Hold the phone parallel to the paper and still: when the page is sharp, well lit and fully inside the frame, the picture is taken on its own, and a counter shows how many pages you have. Short hints say what is wrong when it is not taken: move closer, hold still, too dark, glare, a corner is outside the picture. The capture button always works too, and the auto-capture can be switched off.
Photograph every page in reading order; the order can be changed later by dragging, but it is quicker to get it right now.
3. Check the pages
Tap Done and the pages appear as thumbnails. Open one to see the result: the page is straightened and the lighting evened out. If a corner was missed, drag it onto the corner of the paper; a magnifier shows the exact spot, and on a desktop the arrow keys move it in small steps. Snap corners to the paper pulls them onto the nearest edge.
The Auto filter picks Natural for colour documents and anything with a stamp or a signature, and Black & white for plain text. Grayscale and Original are there too, and the Before / after view shows the unfiltered page at full zoom, so you can check that small digits, commas and a faint stamp survived.
Check pages looks for pages that are turned the wrong way or blank and proposes to rotate or remove them; nothing changes until you tap.
4. Save the PDF
Choose the Page format: Auto estimates the paper's proportions from the photo and says it is an estimate; if you know it is A4 or Letter, pick it. Choose the Size: Small (e-mail) re-encodes each page down to a size that mails well, Balanced is the usual export, Maximum quality is for archiving. Tick Searchable text (OCR) if the recipient will need to search or copy from the PDF, and pick the document's language.
Tap Save PDF. The file lands in the phone's downloads, or goes straight to another app through the share sheet where the browser supports it. From there, Continue with hands the PDF to Compress PDF, Sign PDF or Protect PDF without uploading it anywhere.
What the tool does not do yet
It does not stitch a long receipt out of several pictures, compose the front and the back of an ID card on one page, flatten the curved page of a book, or remove fingers holding a page: those modes are being built, and until they ship each picture is one page as photographed. It does not read handwriting: searchable text works for printed text only. It cannot make a sharp page out of a blurred picture; retake it instead.
Where the pages are
The pages are saved in the browser's own storage on the phone as you scan, so closing the tab does not lose them: the tool offers to continue next time. They are never uploaded: detection, filters, text recognition and the PDF are computed on the phone; the only downloads are the tool's own engines, fetched once. Start over deletes the saved scan.
Tips
- Photograph from directly above, not from the chair: a steep angle costs resolution on the far edge even after straightening.
- Flash on glossy paper gives a white blob in the middle of the page; use the room's light instead.
- Black & white pages are stored as CCITT G4 in the PDF, lossless and usually far smaller than JPEG: good for long text documents.
Questions
- Does it work on iPhone?
- Yes, in Safari. The camera works on the https page; HEIC photos from the gallery are decoded on the phone.
- Is there a limit on the number of pages?
- Up to 100 pages per scan. A longer document can be scanned in parts and joined with Merge PDF.
- Can I sign the scan?
- Yes: the Sign annotation draws your signature into a page before saving, or hand the PDF to Sign PDF afterwards.