Scan to PDF
Photograph pages with your camera and save them as a PDF. The images never leave your device.
- The camera feed stays in this page — nothing is uploaded
- No sign-up, no quotas, free to use as often as you like
How it works
Scanner apps want an account, a subscription, and permission to upload your documents — which is a lot to ask for photographing a form. Your phone already has a good camera and your browser can already build a PDF. This connects the two and stops there.
How it works
Allow camera access, hold the page in frame and capture. Each capture becomes a page, shown as a thumbnail you can remove if it came out badly. When the pages are right, build the PDF and it downloads. No app to install and no account to create.
The document enhancement
The default mode is built for paper. It estimates the page's own brightness across the frame and stretches each pixel against that local estimate, which pushes paper to white and ink to black while coping with uneven lighting — the shadow of your own hand, a lamp on one side, a bright window. A single global threshold, which is the simpler approach, fails badly in exactly those conditions. Greyscale and unmodified options are there when you want the photograph as taken.
Getting a good scan
Even light beats bright light: diffuse daylight or a ceiling light is better than a desk lamp at an angle. Fill the frame with the page, hold the camera parallel to it rather than tilted, and rest your elbows on something. A darker surface underneath helps the edges of the page stand out.
What it does not do
It does not detect the page edges and correct perspective automatically, so a photograph taken at an angle stays at an angle. It does not recognise text — if you need a searchable PDF, run the result through the scanned-PDF OCR tool afterwards, which also runs on your device.
Why this is the private option
Documents people scan are passports, bank letters, medical forms, contracts, tax paperwork. The camera stream is drawn into the page and never recorded or transmitted; the PDF is assembled in the browser and saved directly. Nothing is uploaded, and closing the tab discards everything.
Scan to PDF — questions
Do I need to install an app?
No. It runs in your browser on a phone, tablet or laptop with a camera.
Does it crop and straighten the page automatically?
No. Edge detection and perspective correction are not included, so hold the camera square to the page.
Can I scan several pages?
Yes. Capture as many as you need, remove any that came out badly, and they are saved as one multi-page PDF in order.
Will the text be searchable?
Not from this tool — the pages are photographs. Run the PDF through the scanned-PDF OCR tool afterwards to add a text layer.
Are the photos uploaded?
No. The camera feed is used in the page and nothing is recorded or sent. Closing the tab discards everything.