--- title: "Document Scanner Online – Photo to Scan, Straight and Clean" description: "Turn a phone photo of a document into a clean scan: corners found and straightened, shadows removed, in colour, grey or black and white, as JPG or PDF." url: "https://imagecompressor.si/document-scanner" lang: "en" --- # Turn a photo of a document into a scan The page is found, straightened and evened out, so a quick phone photo looks like it came from a scanner. ## How it works 1. **Add your images** Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection. 2. **Pick a quality or a target size** Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need. 3. **Download** Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP. A photo of a letter, a receipt or a certificate taken on a desk is rarely square. The page leans, the far edge is narrower than the near one, the lamp leaves a shadow across it, and the table shows round the edges. This scanner finds the four corners of the sheet, pulls them straight, crops away everything outside, and evens out the light, so the result reads like a flatbed scan. The corners it finds are shown on your photo. When one is off, drag it onto the page's real corner, or move it with the arrow keys, and the scan follows. Then choose the look: colour keeps stamps and photos, grey suits pencil, and black and white gives crisp text on pure white with the smallest file. Download it as JPG, PNG or a one-page A4 PDF. The photo is processed on our server and deleted once the scan is made. ## How to photograph a page for a good scan Lay the page flat on a surface darker than the paper, such as a wooden table or a dark folder, so its edges stand out. Hold the phone above the page rather than at an angle, fill most of the screen with it, and keep your shadow off the sheet. Good light matters more than a good camera: daylight from a window beats the phone's flash, which leaves a bright spot. Glossy paper and laminated cards reflect light. Tilt the page slightly away from the window until the glare is gone, then take the photo. ## What each look is for Colour is right for anything where colour carries meaning: an official stamp, a signature in blue, a photo on an ID card. Grey keeps soft shades, which helps with pencil and faint print. Black and white is what most forms and offices expect of a scanned letter: every pixel is either ink or paper, so text is sharp and the file is small enough to upload anywhere. Whichever look you choose, the paper is evened out first, so the corner in shadow comes out as white as the corner near the window. ## After scanning If a form limits the size of the upload, the scanned PDF tool can bring a multi-page PDF under a number of kilobytes. To combine several scanned pages into one PDF, download them as JPG and use the JPG to PDF tool, which keeps them in the order you choose. For an ID card or a passport page, colour is usually the right choice, since officials want to see the photo and the security printing. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does it work with a photo of a receipt? Yes. Long, narrow pages are found like any other, and black and white makes faded thermal print easier to read. ### What if the corners are wrong? Drag each one onto the page's corner. Find again puts them back where the scanner found them. ### Is the scan readable text? It is a picture of the page. To get editable text, use the image to text tool on the scan. ### Is my document kept? No. The photo is deleted from our server as soon as the scan is made, and it is never shared. ### Can I scan a page with a curved spine, like a book? Straight pages work best. A book page is straightened at its corners, but the curve near the spine stays. ### Can I scan with my phone's camera directly? Yes. On a phone, the upload button can open the camera, and the photo goes straight into the scanner. ### How large is the scan? The page keeps the detail of your photo, up to 3,000 pixels on its longer side, which is about 250 dots per inch on an A4 sheet. ## Related tools - [Compress a scanned PDF to a size limit](https://imagecompressor.si/compress-scanned-pdf): Type the KB limit from the form, and get the same pages in a PDF that fits under it. - [Convert JPG to PDF](https://imagecompressor.si/jpg-to-pdf): Put a set of photos into one PDF, a page for each, in the order you want. - [Clean up a photographed signature](https://imagecompressor.si/signature-cleaner): Shadows, grey paper and notebook lines go; the ink stays, cropped close and sized for your form.