You may remember a time when you were looking for a real scanner to make a digital copy of a document. The whole process was tedious and time consuming. But today, your iPhone or iPad can get similar results in a matter of seconds.
Most document scanning apps for iPhone and iPad have gotten pretty good over the years with only negligible differences in scanning quality. Regardless, the actual application you use can play an important role, mainly due to factors such as UI intuitiveness and processing speed.
Below are five great apps, each with a different flavor, that provide a seamless document scanning experience. Also, they are completely free to use. So, without further ado, let’s go over each of them.
1. Files App
Forget visiting the App Store. If you’re running iOS 13 or iPadOS on your iPhone or iPad, the built-in Files app has a native document scanning tool. Previously, this tool was only accessible from the Notes app (more on this later), but its inclusion in the Files app makes it super easy to scan and save your documents.
To access this tool, start by tapping the horizontal ellipsis icon (three dots) in the upper-right corner of the Files app. Tap Scan Documents in the menu that opens.
When the scanner is activated, position the camera over the document you want to scan. The scanner has auto-detection technology – wait a few seconds and it will take a snapshot of the document.
It also does a great job of setting up and ironing the document, even when scanning at an angle. There’s also a manual scan mode if you prefer quality over speed.
The result should look like a copy from a real scanner, and with that you can change the colors if you want to use a few presets with increased contrast. You can also continue to scan more pages and they will create a single continuous multi-page document.
Once satisfied, you can choose to save in PDF format (both locally and to supported cloud storage services) to any location in the Files app. You can then preview the scanned documents, annotate them, share them with other apps, etc., from the comfort of the Files app.
If there is a downside, it is the lack of optical character recognition technology. That said, the scan quality and edge detection technology are outstanding, and if you don’t mind missing out on OCR, you probably won’t need anything else.
2. Notes App
The Notes app on your iPhone and iPad also comes with the same document scanning functionality as the Files app. And you only need to be running iOS 11 or higher to use it; this is great if your device doesn’t support iOS 13 or iPadOS. Simply tap the camera-shaped icon at the top of the onscreen keyboard and then tap Scan Documents; You can scan documents immediately.
While scanning documents through the Files app is much more convenient, using it from the Notes app works wonders if you prefer to add scanned images directly to your notes.
But there is another advantage. Unlike the Files app, the Notes app has limited OCR features that will generate search results even if words are found in a scanned document. It is quite useful. However, you cannot select any text or copy it to the clipboard.
Additionally, you can scan your documents and export them outside of the Notes application. But of course, using the Files app (unless your device can’t be upgraded to iOS 13 or iPadOS) works best for such situations.
3. Adobe Scan
If the integrated document scanner in the Files app and Notes app isn’t enough, Adobe Scan is a third-party alternative. It is completely free to use and has a number of outstanding features. Scanning documents is a breeze as the app quickly automatically captures, crops and re-adjusts documents. You can also scan documents manually.
Adobe Scan also comes with multiple editing tools that work well; you can rotate images, change colors and clean images from unwanted visual artifacts.
All scanned documents go through text recognition after saving. You can then manually copy text from your document scans to the iPhone or iPad clipboard or choose to edit it using a PDF editor.
Adobe Scan also has additional scanning modes (Whiteboard, Form, and Business Card) that you can easily switch to while scanning, each with its own specific functions. For example, with Business Card, you can scan business cards and easily add details to the Contacts app.
4. Office Lens
Office Lens is another outstanding document scanner for iPhone and iPad. It allows you to easily scan single or multi-page documents using both manual and automatic scanning modes. The app also has many editing tools like adding text and making markups before saving.
Unlike the document scanners listed above, Office Lens also supports a number of output formats. Besides saving documents as PDFs, you can also save them as images directly in your photo library.
If you have Microsoft Word installed, you can transfer documents in DOCX format and edit them right there thanks to the presence of OCR technology.
Offlice Lens also works well with OneDrive, where you can easily save your documents to Microsoft’s cloud storage service and access them from other supported platforms. If you already have OneDrive on your iPhone or iPad, you can skip installing Office Lens altogether and use the integrated OneDrive document browser instead.
5. Evernote Scannable
Evernote Scannable falls short in terms of features when compared to other scanners on the list. However, the auto-scan mode is significantly faster, making scanning multi-page documents extremely easy.
When it comes to editing your documents, Evernote Scannable only offers rotation and cropping. When you’re done, you can save the scanned items in image or PDF format to your preferred Evernote notebook.
Alternatively, you can save the scanned documents to the camera roll and then convert them to PDF format if you want.
Go Paperless
The integrated document scanner in the Files app and the Notes app works like a charm and helps you get the job done in most cases.
Here’s a video about the best document scanner apps for iPhone and iPad from our Guiding Tech (English) YouTube Channel:
/>
But if you want access to more features, both Adobe Scan and Office Lens will help you a lot with their advanced editing options and completely free OCR capabilities. For situations where you prefer something light and fast, opt for Evernote Scannable.
Next: As you can see, not all document scanners support OCR. But don’t worry. Here are five ways to easily extract text from your scanned documents.
Support our work ❤️
If you enjoyed this article, consider leaving a tip to help us keep publishing great content.
