Scan to PDF with Your Phone

You do not need a scanner to make a PDF of a paper document. Your phone camera is enough. Take a photo of each page, add the photos to the box above, and press Convert to PDF. You get one clean PDF file, ready to email, upload or print.

This is a simple way to scan to PDF online free. It works in the browser on your phone or computer. There is nothing to install and no account to make. The photos are turned into a PDF on your own device, so your pages are not uploaded.

The tool starts with Auto enhance switched on. It makes the paper lighter and the text darker, so a photo looks more like a scanned page. You can also pick Black & white, Grayscale or plain Colour.

A photo of a page is easy to take, but it is not easy to send. Offices, banks, schools and online forms usually ask for a PDF. A PDF keeps several pages together in one file, in a fixed order. It opens the same way on every phone, computer and printer.

A PDF also prints well. A loose photo can print too small or cut off at the edges. An A4 or Letter PDF page prints at the right size, with the page centred and a clean margin.

So the job is simple. You take photos of your pages, and this page turns them into a proper PDF document. That is what most people mean when they want to scan a paper with a phone.

Here is how to scan document with phone camera in a few steps. Open this page in your phone browser. Tap Use camera. Your phone opens the back camera. Take the photo and confirm it. The photo appears as the first page.

For the next page, tap Add more pictures. On many phones the menu that opens lets you take another photo or pick photos from your gallery. If it only shows your files, take the photos with your camera app first. Repeat until every page is added. You can also take all the photos first with your normal camera app, then add them together with Select photos of pages.

The camera button takes one photo each time. There is no automatic page finder. The tool does not look for the edges of the paper and does not straighten a page photographed at an angle. A good photo is therefore the most important step. Hold the phone straight above the page, keep the whole page in view and let the paper fill most of the frame.

If some of the table or floor still shows around the paper, tap the crop button on that photo and drag the box to the edges of the page. The section on taking a good photo below has more tips.

To scan to PDF on iPhone without any extra app, open this page in Safari. Tap Use camera to take a photo of a page, or tap Select photos of pages and choose photos from your library. iPhone photos are often saved as HEIC. That is fine. They are read in your browser with no setting to change.

Drag the pages into order with your finger. Press and hold a photo for a moment, then move it. Choose your colour and page size, then tap Convert to PDF. Tap Download PDF to save it, or tap Share to send it by Mail, Messages or another app.

The iPhone Notes and Files apps also have a document scanner built in. It finds the page edges for you. It is a good choice for a quick scan. This page is useful when you want a set page size, a file under a size limit such as 200 KB, page numbers, a password, or photos you already took.

To scan to PDF on Android, open this page in Chrome or any other browser. Tap Use camera to take a photo of each page, or tap Select photos of pages to pick photos from your gallery. The PDF is made in the browser, so it works on any Android phone with a modern browser.

Long-press a photo and drag it to change the order. Tap the rotate buttons on a photo if it is sideways. Then tap Convert to PDF. Download saves the file to your Downloads folder. Share sends it straight to Gmail, WhatsApp, Google Drive or another app on your phone.

Some Android phones also have a scan feature in Google Drive or in the camera app. Those work well too. This page gives you more control over page size, colour, file size and page order, and it works the same on every phone.

To scan multiple pages into one PDF, add a photo for every page. Each photo becomes one page of a single PDF, in the order you see in the grid. There is no limit of two or three pages. You can add up to 500 photos at a time.

Order matters for documents. Drag a photo to move it. The Sort menu can order photos by name, newest first, oldest first, or reverse the whole list. Undo and Redo fix a mistake in one tap, and Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y work on a computer.

You can also mix in a PDF you already have. Its pages appear in the grid next to your photos. To join two finished PDFs, use Merge PDF instead.

If you prefer one PDF for each page, open More options and choose One PDF per picture. You get a ZIP file with one PDF for every photo.

Colour mode decides how the scanned pages look. It is in More options, under Colour. There are four choices.

To scan to PDF black and white, open More options, find Colour and choose Black & white. The light grey of the paper becomes white and the ink becomes dark. This looks much more like a page from an office scanner. It also makes the PDF smaller, which helps with upload limits.

Black & white works best with a sharp photo in even light. If part of the page is in shadow, that part can turn grey. Take the photo again in better light, or choose Grayscale for that document.

The page preview shows the colour you choose before you convert. If you already have a PDF and only want to remove the colour, use PDF to Black and White.

To scan to PDF A4 size, keep Page size on A4. Each photo is placed on an A4 page, centred, with the margin you choose. A4 is the standard paper size in most of the world. In the US, Canada and parts of Latin America the tool picks Letter for you on your first visit.

Same as picture makes each page exactly the size of the photo, with no white border. More options also has Legal, A3, A5 and a custom size in millimetres or inches.

Orientation can stay on Auto. A tall photo gets a portrait page and a wide photo gets a landscape page. Choose Portrait or Landscape if every page must be the same way.

Margin adds white space around each photo. None is edge to edge. Small gives a neat border. Large leaves room for binding or hole punching. Picture fit, in More options, chooses whether the whole photo fits inside the page or fills the page completely, which may trim the edges.

Turning a phone photo to PDF gives a clean result when the photo itself is clean. No setting can fix a blurry or crooked photo, so a few seconds of care helps a lot.

Many scanner apps ask you to install them, sign up, watch ads or pay to remove a watermark. You can scan to PDF without app installs here. The whole tool runs in your phone browser, in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Samsung Internet.

Nothing is added to your phone. There is no account, no watermark and no limit on how often you use it. Close the tab when you are done, and nothing is left behind except the PDF you saved.

A dedicated app can do a few things this page does not, such as finding the page edges automatically. If you scan many documents every day, an app may suit you better. For the occasional form, letter or receipt, the browser is quicker.

To scan receipts to PDF, photograph each receipt on a dark surface, add the photos and convert. For a travel expense claim or a tax folder, that gives you one PDF with every receipt, in order.

Receipts are small, so one per A4 page wastes paper. Open More options and set Pictures per page to 4 or 6. Several receipts then share one page, and the preview shows the layout. Choose Black & white to make faded thermal paper easier to read.

Use the File name box to give the PDF a clear name, such as travel-receipts-march.pdf. Page numbers in More options help when an accounts team checks the pages.

Thermal receipts fade over time. A PDF made today keeps a readable copy. Keep the paper originals too if your tax office or employer asks for them.

Online forms often limit uploads to 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB or 1 MB. Under File size, choose Under 100 KB or another limit, then convert. The photos are made smaller step by step in your browser until the PDF fits, keeping the text as sharp as possible. You then see the final size and a tick if it is under the limit.

If the limit is too small for the number of pages, the tool tells you so and gives you the smallest readable file instead. Black & white and two photos per page both help to reach a small limit. For a PDF you already made, Compress PDF can shrink it further.

Original quality keeps your photos at full resolution. With Auto enhance, Grayscale or Black & white, each photo is saved again with the new colours at high quality.

A scanned page is a picture, so you cannot search or copy its text. Make text searchable (OCR) adds an invisible text layer to the PDF. Then you can search it, select text and copy it. It reads English, Hindi and English, or Hindi, Marathi and English.

Turn it on in More options, under Server extras. OCR cannot run in the browser, so this one step uploads the finished PDF to our server. The file is processed and then deleted. The option is labelled Uploads the PDF, so you always know.

If you only want the text and not a PDF, use Image to Text on a photo of the page instead.

Before you send a scanned PDF, take thirty seconds to check it. Tap Preview PDF in the result box. It shows each page as it really is in the file.

Look for four things. Are all pages there, and in the right order? Is any page upside down or sideways? Is the small print sharp enough to read? Is anything private visible that should not be, such as another document lying next to the page?

If something is wrong, tap Change settings. Your photos and order are kept, so you can fix one page and convert again. Tap Convert more pictures only when you want to start a new PDF from scratch.

When the PDF is ready, you have a few ways to send it. Download PDF saves the file to your phone or computer. On a phone, Share opens the share menu, so you can send the file straight to email, a chat app or a cloud drive. The Share button appears only in browsers that support sharing files.

For an online form, download the PDF first, then go back to the form and pick the file from your Downloads folder or the Files app. Check the size limit on the form before you convert, and choose a matching File size so the upload is not rejected.

For email, most services accept attachments up to about 20 or 25 MB. Original quality is fine for a few pages. For a long document, choose Smaller to keep the file light for the person who receives it.

For printing, keep A4 or Letter to match the paper in the printer, and a Small or Large margin so nothing is cut off at the edges. Black & white saves ink on a colour printer.

Here is a real example. Say you need to send a signed ten-page rental agreement as one PDF, and the landlord's form accepts files up to 1 MB.

First, clear a dark table near a window. Lay page one flat and take a photo from straight above with Use camera. Tap Add more pictures and take the next page. Repeat for all ten pages. If you lose count, check the numbers under the thumbnails. Each photo shows its position, such as 4.

Next, look at the grid. If a page is out of place, drag it to the right spot. If one photo shows a lot of table, tap its crop button and pull the corners in to the paper. If a page is sideways, tap rotate.

Then open More options. Keep Auto enhance, or choose Black & white because the agreement is printed text. Under File size, choose Under 1 MB. In the File name box, type rental-agreement-signed.pdf. Turn on page numbers if you like.

Finally, tap Convert to PDF. The result shows the number of pages and the final size, with a tick when it is under 1 MB. Tap Preview PDF to flip through it, then Download PDF or Share. The whole job takes a few minutes.

A flatbed scanner presses the page flat under glass and lights it evenly. A phone photo has none of that, so it can show shadows, a slight tilt or a curve near the spine of a book. For most forms, letters and receipts, a careful phone photo is still clear enough. Offices and online portals accept such PDFs every day.

Resolution is rarely the problem. A modern phone camera takes photos of 12 megapixels or more. That is more detail than a typical office scan at 300 dpi on an A4 page. The quality of the light and how straight you hold the phone matter much more than the camera itself.

A scanner is still the better choice for very old or fragile papers, for photos you want to print large, and for legal documents that must look exactly like the original. For everything else, the phone in your pocket does the job in a minute.

The tool works on a computer too, in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebook. Take the photos with your phone and move them to the computer, for example by email, a cloud drive or a cable. Then drop them on the box, click Select photos of pages, or paste a picture with Ctrl+V.

A bigger screen makes it easier to check many pages. You can see the whole grid, drag pages with the mouse, and use Ctrl+Z to undo. Press Ctrl+Enter to convert. Add a folder lets you add every photo in a folder at once, sorted by file name.

If your computer has a webcam, the Use camera button may open a normal file picker instead of the camera. That depends on the browser. For paper documents, the phone camera gives much sharper pages anyway.

You can add up to 500 photos at a time. Each file can be up to 200 MB, and about 1 GB in total, which is what a browser tab can handle well. The tool reads JPG, PNG, iPhone HEIC, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF, TIFF and SVG, and you can mix in PDF files.

On an older phone, very many full-size photos can use a lot of memory. If the browser struggles, make the PDF in two parts and join them with Merge PDF. For plain photo collections without scan settings, JPG to PDF and image to PDF use the same engine.

Your photos are not uploaded. Reading the photos, enhancing them, cropping, arranging and building the PDF all happen in your browser, on your own device. That matters for ID cards, bank letters and medical papers.

Only a few optional steps use our server: making text searchable (OCR), adding a password, and opening TIFF files. Each one is labelled before you use it. In a few browsers with strict anti-fingerprinting protection, a size limit is reached by compressing the finished PDF on our server, and the tool tells you so.

When a file does go to our server, it travels over an encrypted HTTPS connection. It is processed straight away and deleted after use. There is no account and nothing is shared.

Take one test photo and convert it before you photograph a long document. If it looks good, the rest will too.

Name the file in More options before you send it, for example rental-agreement-signed.pdf, so the person who receives it knows what it is.

Check the page preview for order and rotation, especially with many pages. It shows the real layout of each page.

Keep the original photos until the PDF is accepted. You can always convert again with different settings.