Set up the page before you shoot
Lay the document flat on a plain, contrasting surface — a dark table for white paper works well. Contrast helps the phone find the page edges automatically, and a flat page avoids the curved lines and blurred corners you get from scanning a sheet in your hand or a document still bound in a booklet.
Light matters more than the camera. Even daylight from a window, or a room with overhead light that does not cast your shadow across the page, gives far better results than the phone’s flash, which tends to produce a bright hotspot and a washed-out centre. Move so that neither you nor the phone casts a shadow on the paper.
Hold the phone parallel to the page, directly above it, with the whole sheet in the frame and a little margin around it. Scanning at an angle produces a trapezoid that has to be corrected later, and every correction loses a little sharpness. Getting it square at the start is the cheapest improvement you can make.
Use the scanner already on your phone
On iPhone and iPad, the Files app and the Notes app both include a Scan Documents option. It detects page edges, straightens the page and lets you capture several pages in a row before saving them together as a single PDF. For most everyday paperwork this is the fastest route from paper to PDF.
On Android, Google Drive has a built-in scanner that does the same job: it captures pages, crops them automatically and saves the result as a PDF in your Drive. Google’s help page on scanning with Drive walks through the steps. Many Android phones also include a document mode in the camera app itself.
Built-in scanners are excellent at capture but give you limited control afterwards — page order, page size and file size are mostly fixed by the app. If you need to adjust any of those, or the pages came from different places, building the PDF from images, as below, gives you that control.
Turn ordinary photos into a PDF
If you already have photos of the pages, or you prefer to use the normal camera, open Image to PDF in your phone’s browser and select the photos. The tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP and other common formats, and it combines everything into a single PDF that you download to your phone.
Drag the pages into the correct order before converting. Photos are added in whatever order your phone hands them over, which is not always the order you took them, and a contract with page three before page two is worse than useless. Checking the order now takes seconds; fixing it later means rebuilding the PDF.
Choose a page size that suits the destination. A4 or US Letter gives every page a standard size, which is what you want for a document that will be printed or submitted. Fit to image keeps each page the exact shape of its photo. A small margin can stop text near the edge looking cramped. The conversion runs in your browser, so the pages are never uploaded.
Crop, straighten and orient each page
A photo of a document usually includes some of the table around it. Crop that away with Crop Image before building the PDF. A tight crop looks more professional, makes the text appear larger on the recipient’s screen and reduces the file size at the same time.
If a page came out sideways or upside down, fix it with Rotate Image before conversion, or rotate the finished PDF page afterwards. Phones decide orientation from how you held them, and a page photographed from directly above often comes out in an unexpected direction.
For handwritten pages, the same steps apply, but readability needs more care — pencil and light ink lose contrast quickly. The guide to converting handwritten notes covers getting faint writing to survive the trip into a PDF.
Keep the file small enough to send
Phone photos are large, and a ten-page scan built from full-resolution photos can easily run to tens of megabytes. That is too big for many email systems and most upload portals. The fix is to reduce the photos before they become a PDF, not after.
Run the photos through Compress Image first. For a document, the text needs to be readable, not printed as a poster, and a moderate quality setting usually keeps every word clear while cutting the size dramatically. Resizing very large photos down helps even more.
If the PDF is already built and still too large, Compress PDF can reduce it further. It rebuilds pages as images, which is exactly what a scan already is, so you lose nothing you had. Check the result at reading size to make sure small print has survived.
Check every page before you share it
Open the finished PDF and scroll through every page, not just the first. Confirm the page count, the order, that nothing is cut off at the edges and that the smallest text on each page is legible. A scan that looks fine at thumbnail size can be unreadable when zoomed, and the recipient will zoom.
If you need to search or copy the text later, run the PDF through OCR PDF. A scan is a set of pictures of text; OCR adds a text layer so the words become searchable and selectable. That is worth doing for anything you will refer back to, such as receipts and contracts.
Name the file for what it is and keep it somewhere you will find it. Scans are often the only digital copy of a paper document, so treat them as records: a clear filename, a consistent folder and, for anything important, a backup.
Open Image to PDFCombine page photos into one PDF, in order — works in a phone browser.
Open Image to PDF →Frequently asked questions
Is a phone scan good enough for official documents?
Often, yes, if the page is flat, evenly lit and fully legible. Some organisations still require an original or a certified copy, so check their requirements before relying on a scan.
Can I make the text in a phone scan searchable?
Yes. A scan is a set of page images, so run OCR on the finished PDF to add a selectable, searchable text layer.
Should I choose A4 or Fit to image when making the PDF?
Choose A4 or US Letter if the PDF will be printed or submitted as a document, so every page has a standard size. Fit to image suits photos where the exact shape matters more.