What is the Scan to PDF tool?
Somebody needs a copy of your passport, a signed page, or last month's receipts, and they want a PDF. You have a phone in your hand and no scanner within a mile. This page lets you scan to PDF with your phone camera: it opens a real camera stream in the browser, you photograph each page, and it assembles the shots into one multi-page PDF.
The camera is genuinely the device camera — the page calls the browser's getUserMedia API,
so you will see a permission prompt the first time and a live viewfinder afterwards. Two things follow
from that. It needs a secure context, meaning the page must be served over HTTPS or run from localhost;
on plain HTTP the browser refuses and the camera never starts. And it needs your permission, which you
can revoke at any time from the padlock icon in the address bar.
Be clear about what this is not. There is no automatic edge detection and no perspective correction — the tool does not hunt for the corners of the paper or flatten a photo taken at an angle, and it has no crop handles either. What you frame is what you get, so square the phone up over the page and fill the frame. If a shot needs trimming, crop it in your phone's photo app and bring it back in through Upload photos.
How to scan documents to PDF free
- Choose Back camera or Front camera, then pick an Enhancement mode — Original (color), Grayscale or Black & white (scan), which is the default.
- Press Start camera and allow access when the browser asks. The viewfinder replaces the placeholder panel.
- Hold the phone flat above the page in even light, fill the frame with the paper, and tap 📸 Capture page. Repeat for every page — they are numbered in the order you shoot them.
- Check the thumbnails under Captured pages. Tap the × on any shot to delete it and take it again; Clear all starts over.
- No camera, or already have photos? Use Upload photos to pick images from your gallery instead — you can select several at once.
- Set Page size to fit the image or to A4 or Letter, choose a margin in points, then press Build PDF to download scan.pdf.
Key features
- A real in-browser viewfinder — the live camera stream runs on the page, so you can see and frame the shot before you take it, with a Stop camera button that releases the device properly.
- Front or back camera — pick before you start; to switch afterwards, stop the camera and start it again.
- Three enhancement modes — keep the original colour, convert to grayscale, or use the black-and-white scan mode that lifts contrast and pushes light pixels to white and dark ones to black for a paper-like result.
- Upload path as well as capture — any images from your gallery work, and they are downscaled to a 2000-pixel long edge so a stack of 12-megapixel photos does not produce a monstrous file.
- Page-by-page control — every shot appears as a numbered thumbnail you can delete individually before building.
- Choice of output geometry — a page that fits each image exactly, or A4 or Letter with the image scaled to fit and centred, plus a margin from 0 to 80 points.
- Consistent image quality — pages are stored as JPEG at 90% quality, a deliberate balance that keeps text readable without producing a file too big to email.
Benefits of using this mobile PDF scanner
- Nothing to install. No scanner app asking for a subscription, an account and access to your whole photo library — just a web page.
- Your ID copies stay on your phone. Frames are captured to a canvas, processed and written into the PDF locally; no photo is ever uploaded.
- No watermark across your scan. Free scanner apps love stamping their name on page one. This does not.
- One file, right order. Ten photos in a chat thread are a nuisance; a single numbered PDF is what the other side actually asked for.
- Works on a laptop too. The same page runs on a webcam-equipped laptop, and the upload route works everywhere regardless of camera.
Who should use this tool?
Students
Lecture notes, a borrowed textbook chapter, a worksheet due at midnight — shoot the pages in black-and-white mode, set A4 so the printout matches everyone else's, and hand in one PDF instead of a folder of photos.
Anyone sending ID or proof documents
Landlords, banks and employers ask for a scan of a passport, a bill or a signed letter. Grayscale keeps a photo ID legible without the colour cast that flat lighting adds, and because the file is built on your phone the image of your document is not sitting in someone else's storage bucket.
Freelancers and anyone doing expenses
Receipts curl, fade and get lost. Photograph them as you collect them, delete the blurry ones from the thumbnail grid, and build a single PDF per month to attach to a claim.
Small offices without a scanner
When the office multifunction device is broken or there never was one, a phone plus this page covers signed contracts and delivery notes. Fit-to-image keeps a small receipt small instead of stretching it across a full A4 sheet.
Frequently asked questions
Does this actually use my phone camera, or just the file picker?
It opens the camera itself through the browser's media API and shows a live viewfinder, so you frame and capture on the page. You will be asked for permission the first time. The upload button is there as a fallback, not as the main route.
Why won't the camera start?
Three usual reasons: the page is not on HTTPS or localhost, so the browser blocks camera access entirely; permission was denied and needs re-enabling from the padlock icon; or another app is holding the camera. If none of that helps, use Upload photos instead.
Does it find the edges of the page and straighten it automatically?
No. There is no edge detection, no perspective correction and no crop tool — the photo goes into the PDF as you framed it. Line the phone up parallel to the page and fill the frame, or crop in your gallery app first and upload the cropped image.
Which enhancement mode should I choose?
Black & white for printed text and forms; it lifts contrast and drops the grey haze from uneven light. Grayscale for pages with photos or a signature where hard thresholding would lose detail. Original for anything where colour carries meaning, such as a highlighted contract or a colour chart.
Can I reorder or rotate the captured pages?
Not on this page — pages appear in the order you shot them and can only be deleted and retaken. To reorder or rotate afterwards, build the PDF and open it in the Organize Pages tool.
Can I search or copy text from the scanned PDF?
Not yet, because each page is a photograph. Run the finished file through the OCR tool to add a text layer, and then the text becomes selectable and searchable.
How large will the PDF be?
Each page is a JPEG at 90% quality, and uploaded photos are capped at a 2000-pixel long edge, so expect a few hundred kilobytes per page. Black-and-white mode compresses better than colour; if the file is still too big for email, run it through Compress PDF.
Is anything uploaded, and does it work offline?
Nothing is uploaded — capture, filtering and PDF assembly all happen in your browser. Once the page has loaded you can turn off mobile data and it will still build your document.
Related tools you might need
No scanner, no app, no upload. Allow the camera above and scan to PDF with your phone camera in the next couple of minutes.
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