Scan to PDF
Capture pages with your camera or upload photos, then combine them into one clean PDF — right in your browser, on your phone or your desktop.
Use your camera to scan a page
Or drop photos here, or click to browse
How scanning with your camera works
Scan to PDF turns photos of a paper document — taken live with your device's camera, or already sitting in your photo gallery — into a single, ordered PDF file. There's no dedicated scanner hardware involved: your camera photographs each page, and the tool stitches those photos together in the order you choose. The camera feed, every captured image, and the finished PDF stay on your device for the entire process — nothing is uploaded anywhere.
After you capture or upload a page, you land on the arrange screen, where you can drag pages into order, rotate a sideways shot, straighten a page that was photographed at an angle (manually, or with the Auto-detect button), or remove one entirely (with a quick undo if you tap the wrong one). Turning on "Enhance scan" applies a grayscale, contrast, and brightness pass to every page in one go for a flatter, more scanner-like black-and-white look — it's off by default, so pages keep their real color unless you turn it on. Before building the PDF you can also choose a page size — keep each page sized to its own photo, or fit everything onto standard A4/Letter pages — and an output quality level to balance sharper text against a smaller file.
Common use cases
- Digitizing signed contracts, forms, or paperwork that only exist on paper
- Turning receipts or invoices into a PDF for expense reports or bookkeeping
- Submitting handwritten homework, assignments, or worksheets as a single file
- Archiving IDs, certificates, or mailed letters before the paper copy gets lost
- Photographing a whiteboard or printed notes to keep alongside digital files
Tips for cleaner scans
- Use even, bright lighting and avoid casting your own shadow over the page
- Hold the camera as straight-on as possible, directly above the page
- Use the straighten (crop) tool if the page was photographed at an angle, and the rotate button if it came out sideways
- Review each shot before keeping it — retake anything blurry rather than fixing it later
- For documents you'll want to search or copy text from later, run the result through the OCR tool
Related tools
Scan to PDF — frequently asked questions
No. The camera feed, every captured or uploaded photo, and the final PDF are all processed locally by your browser's JavaScript engine. Nothing is sent to a server at any point, which also means the tool works the same whether you're offline or online after the page has loaded.
Yes, and it's built mobile-first: on a phone browser the camera defaults to your rear camera, page reordering works with a touch-and-drag gesture (not just a mouse), and every button on the page is sized for a thumb, not just a cursor. You can also skip the camera entirely and pick existing photos from your gallery through the upload option.
Yes. After you tap the shutter, you'll see a full-size preview of that exact shot with "Retake" and "Use this photo" options — the photo only joins your page stack once you confirm it, so a blurry or badly lit shot never has to be found and deleted later.
Pages keep their real color by default — nothing is converted automatically. If you'd rather have a flatter, higher-contrast, more scanner-like black-and-white look (useful for plain text documents), turn on "Enhance scan" before building the PDF; it converts every page to grayscale and boosts contrast and brightness in one pass. It's a global adjustment applied to the whole photo, so a page with very uneven lighting (a shadow across one corner, for example) may still show that unevenness after enhancing.
You can drag all four corners of the crop tool onto the actual edges of your document, and there's also an "Auto-detect" button that tries to find those edges for you by analyzing contrast in the photo. Auto-detect works well when your document clearly contrasts with the surface underneath it and was photographed close to straight-on — it's a helpful starting point, not a guarantee, so check the result and adjust the corners manually if it's off, especially on low-contrast or heavily skewed photos.
Yes. Removing a page shows a brief "Page removed — Undo" notice at the bottom of the screen; tapping Undo puts it right back in its original spot in the order. If that notice has already disappeared, you'll need to recapture or re-upload the photo instead.
There's no hard page limit — you can keep adding photos as long as your device's memory allows, though very large batches (dozens of high-resolution photos) will naturally take longer to build since everything runs on your device rather than a server. This tool outputs an image-based PDF, not a searchable one; if you need to select or search the text afterward, run the finished file through the site's OCR PDF tool.