PDF Scanner
Scan documents with your camera — enhance, crop, and export to PDF, all in your browser
How to fix:
1. Click the lock/camera icon in your browser address bar
2. Find Camera permission and change it to "Allow"
3. Refresh this page
4. If the option is not there, open your browser settings → Privacy → Camera and add this site
Scan queue
No pages yet. Capture your first page to get started.
How it works
- 1
Allow camera access and point your camera at a document or photo you want to scan.
- 2
Capture the page, then enhance it — switch between original, grayscale, and black-and-white, adjust brightness/contrast, crop, and rotate.
- 3
Add each processed page to your scan queue — you can add as many pages as you need and reorder them by dragging.
- 4
Export your scan queue as a clean multi-page PDF, or save it directly to your PDF Manager library.
The enhancement pipeline, in order
- Deskew — text-line angle detection straightens pages up to ±15°.
- Cleanup — adaptive thresholding whitens paper gray; shadow removal evens phone-photo lighting.
- OCR layer — recognized text becomes invisible searchable content beneath the cleaned image.
- Rebuild — pages reassemble to PDF in your original order.
From photographed pages to clean, searchable files
Auto deskew, contrast cleanup and OCR run in sequence — the difference between a phone snapshot and something you'd email to a bank.
Camera capture with retake
Point your phone or webcam at a page, capture it, and retake any shot you are unhappy with before it joins the queue. Front and rear camera switching covers documents, receipts, ID cards, and whiteboard notes.
Grayscale and black-and-white
Process each snapshot in original, grayscale, or black-and-white mode, then fine-tune brightness and contrast. Clockwise and counter-clockwise rotate buttons straighten a page captured at an angle.
Crop and multi-page queue
Trim the desk around your paper by hand, or let auto-crop find the page edges for you. Stack several captured pages in a queue, then export the whole batch as one multi-page PDF or save it straight into PDF Manager.
Searchable output
Every processed page carries an invisible text layer, so the finished PDF indexes in Drive, Dropbox and desktop search.
Frequently asked questions
Is my camera feed or my documents uploaded anywhere?⌄
No. The camera feed, captured images, and final PDF are all processed locally in your browser — nothing is ever sent to any server.
Can I scan multiple pages into one PDF?⌄
Yes. Capture each page, click Add to queue, then export the whole queue as one multi-page PDF. You can reorder pages by dragging thumbnails.
What image adjustments can I make?⌄
Switch between Original, Grayscale, and B&W modes; adjust brightness/contrast; rotate 90°; and crop by dragging corner handles or using auto-detect.
Does this work on desktop without a camera?⌄
The scanner needs a camera. Most laptops have a built-in webcam. On desktop without one, use our image-to-pdf tool to convert existing photos.
Related tools
What Is a PDF Scanner?
A PDF scanner turns your camera into a document scanner, so a printed page becomes a clean, shareable PDF without any dedicated hardware. Bills, receipts, ID cards, whiteboard notes, and printed articles can all be captured with your phone or webcam and cleaned up: the tool enhances the image with grayscale or black-and-white modes, lets you adjust brightness and contrast, crop away the desk around the paper, and rotate the page straight. You can capture several pages and queue them into a single multi-page PDF. You stay in control at every step, from the first shot to the final multi-page export.
What this tool can do
- 📷 Capture pages directly from your camera, switching between front and rear cameras
- 🌫️ Enhance each shot with original, grayscale, or black-and-white modes
- 🎚️ Fine-tune brightness and contrast until the text is crisp
- ✂️ Crop with four draggable corner handles, or use one-click auto-crop
- 🔄 Rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise to straighten the page
- 🗂️ Queue multiple pages and export them as one multi-page PDF, or save the job to your PDF library
When you'll use it
- 🧾 Photograph receipts on the go and turn them into an expense report PDF
- 📋 Digitize printed forms or ID documents when no scanner is nearby
- 🖍️ Capture whiteboard or notebook pages and clean them before sharing
- 📚 Scan a few pages of a book or article into a compact PDF to read later
All image processing happens locally in your browser — photos and the finished PDF never leave your device. Scanning quality depends on your camera and lighting: steady hands, flat paper, and even light give the best results. The tool captures and enhances images but does not perform OCR, so the text in your scan is not searchable or selectable.