Scan with camera
Photograph your pages and get a PDF — the image is never transmitted.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
On a phone this can open your camera app, which usually takes sharper photos — and photos from an iPhone work as they are.
Before you start
- Lay the page flat in even light and fill the frame — sharp, even light reads best.
- Retake or drop a page before you build the file; the thumbnails show exactly what goes in.
Good to know
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Next, run OCR PDF → Compress PDF on the result back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
Take your pages
Turn on the camera and hold the page flat with even light. Your browser asks for permission — that prompt is from the browser, not from us.
Set it up the way you want
Take each page in turn. Retake or drop any page you are not happy with before you build the file; the thumbnails show exactly what will end up in the PDF.
Download the result
Download the PDF. Each page keeps the proportions of its photo, so nothing gets cropped or padded with white.
Questions about Scan with camera
- Does the picture get uploaded?
- No. The frame goes from the camera to a canvas to the PDF, all inside this tab. It is worth knowing this is unusual: most scanning apps send the image somewhere to be processed.
- How do I get a readable result?
- Even light and a flat page do more than anything else. Avoid a shadow from your own hand, and photograph straight down rather than at an angle. If a page still comes out crooked, run Deskew afterwards.
- Can I make the text searchable?
- Yes, but not here — this produces an image of the page. Run OCR on the result and the words become selectable and searchable while the page still looks the same.