How to scan documents with your phone and get a clean result

Your phone camera is sharper than most flatbed scanners. What it lacks is the even lighting and flat positioning that make a scan look like a scan, and both are easy to arrange.

Taking the photo

• Put the page on a dark, flat surface. Contrast at the edges helps you crop accurately.
• Use daylight from a window, not the flash. Flash produces a bright hotspot and hard shadows.
• Stand so your own shadow falls away from the page. This is the single most common mistake.
• Hold the phone parallel to the page, directly above the centre, and fill the frame.
• Tap to focus and check the text is sharp when you zoom in before moving on.

Turning photos into a document

Run each photo through Document Scanner. Grayscale mode evens out the lighting, whitens the paper and darkens the ink, which both looks better and shrinks the file considerably. Black and white mode goes further and suits plain printed text.

Then combine the pages with Image to PDF, choosing A4 so the result prints properly. Drag the pages into order before converting.

Two finishing touches

Make PDF Searchable adds an invisible text layer so you can search the document later. For an archive of bills and certificates this is what makes the difference between a folder of images and something usable.

Compress PDF brings the size down before you email it. Ten phone photos easily make a 30 MB PDF, which most mail servers will refuse.