Scanning Documents with Your Phone

Nowadays nearly everyone has a phone with a camera. There are pros and cons to this. I have a lot more photos of my 7-year-old than I do of my 19-year-old.

There are fewer students feverishly taking notes in class as the teacher writes on the board, most opting to snap a pic once the lecture is done. Snapping a picture of a document or some needed information is a big-time saver when there are no other means around. At the same time, taking a photo of a document is a bit tricky, compared to a scanner or copy machine. It also doesn’t come out in quite the same, easy to read, way.

I’ve used a few third-party apps on my phone for this. The advantage of this is that these apps have features suited to documents that stock camera apps don’t or didn’t. For one, they can automatically detect the edges and corners of pages, making it much easy and quicker to frame the document. The one I used would also let you adjust it in case it got it wrong. They also have features for converting to PDF. There are features foremailing or uploading to a cloud drive without the extra steps. Best of all, you can choose to take it in black and white to make the text sharper, making it appear like it was photocopied. The main problem with these third-party apps, is they typically come with ads or a limited feature set unless you buy the pro version. While a pro version may very well be worth it, I have not ever used one.

Fortunately, document scanning has started to become more of a standard feature. The Android camera app will have a “scan document” button pop up when it recognizes a document in frame. Although, mine is finicky to get to show up. In Google Drive, there is a (+) button in the bottom right-hand corner. Clicking it will allow you to scan a document and upload it to Google Drive or email it. Other camera apps are beginning to include this feature as well, including Microsoft Lens. I don’t have an iPhone, but I believe the iPhone camera app has this feature as well. I haven’t used the stock camera document scanning much but I plan to in the future. If it just doesn’t have the same capabilities, buying a third-party app is well worth the convenience.