Scan to PDF — Free Document Scanner in Your Browser

Scan notes, assignments and documents to PDF with your phone camera: auto-straighten, crop and clean to black and white. No app, no watermark, no upload.

About Scan to PDF

Turns photos of paper pages into a straightened, cleaned PDF. It finds each page's corners, flattens the perspective, evens out shadows, and builds an A4, Letter or fit-to-image PDF on your phone or computer without an app.

How to use Scan to PDF

1. Tap Take photo to use your phone's camera app, Scan with live camera to shoot several pages in a row inside the page, or drop existing JPG, PNG or WebP photos.
2. Wait for Finding edges… on each thumbnail. Pages where the edges were not found are marked; tap them to crop.
3. Tap any page to adjust it: drag the four corner circles (a magnifier shows the exact spot), use Auto detect to restore the detected corners, rotate, and choose a filter.
4. Reorder pages by dragging or with the arrow buttons.
5. Pick Filter for all pages (Original, Clean, Black & White or Grayscale), Page size (A4, Letter or Fit to image) and Quality (Standard · smaller or High · 300 dpi).
6. Build the PDF and press Download PDF.

When it helps

Submitting handwritten assignments

Black & White stores each page as a 1-bit image instead of a JPEG, which keeps ink edges crisp and makes multi-page PDFs small enough for college portals and email.

Receipts, forms and letters with colour

Clean keeps colour but estimates the paper brightness across the page and lifts it to white, which removes the grey cast and hand shadow typical of phone shots. Use Original for photos, stamps or anything where exact colour matters.

Combining pages shot at different times

Drop in photos already in your gallery along with new captures, reorder them, and export one PDF.

Tips

• Put the page on a darker, plain surface. Detection relies on contrast between paper and background, so white paper on a white bed sheet often fails.
• Fit the whole page in the frame with a little margin; if a corner is cut off, the tool cannot find it and falls back to the full photo.
• Shoot from straight above when you can. Perspective correction fixes tilt, but steep angles stretch the far edge and soften text there.
• Standard renders at 150 dpi (Black & White pages at 200 dpi) and is enough for reading on screen; choose High · 300 dpi only for printing or OCR.
• If Camera access was blocked, allow the camera for the site in browser settings, or use Take photo, which goes through your phone's camera app.

Limitations

• The PDF contains images only; text is not recognised or searchable. Run it through an OCR tool afterwards if you need selectable text.
• Edge detection can miss on cluttered desks, patterned tablecloths, curled pages, book spreads or pages that touch the photo edge. Adjust the corners by hand in those cases.
• It flattens perspective but not curvature, so the curved area near a book's spine stays curved.
• Photos are capped at 4096 px on the long side while processing, which is ample for documents but not for archival-quality scans of fine artwork.
• Live camera needs a browser with camera access over HTTPS; some in-app browsers (for example inside social apps) block it.

What happens to your files

If you use Scan with live camera, the browser asks for camera permission; frames are captured locally and the camera stream stops when you close the viewer. Detection, warping, filtering and PDF assembly all happen in a Web Worker on your device, so page photos are never uploaded. The finished PDF is saved to your in-browser Workspace (IndexedDB, kept for seven days) as well as downloaded.

Related guides

• How to Reduce PDF Size for Government Portals (100 KB, 200 KB, 1 MB)
• How to Scan Documents to PDF with Your Phone
• How to Fix Blurry Scanned PDFs: Contrast, Thresholding, and DPI
• PDF DPI Explained: When to Use 150, 200, or 300 DPI for Official Uploads

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to install an app?

No. Open this page on your phone and use the camera directly in the browser.

Are my pages uploaded?

No. Photos are processed and the PDF is made inside your browser.

Does it remove shadows?

Yes. The Clean and Black & White filters even out lighting and make the paper white, like a real scanner.

Is there a watermark?

No watermark and no page limit.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. File Studio is built on a strict local-first architecture. Every PDF operation — merging, splitting, compressing, redacting — runs entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. Your files never leave your computer. You can even disconnect your internet after the page loads and the tools will continue working perfectly.

Is File Studio completely free?

Yes, 100% free with no limits. There are no file size caps, no daily limits, no watermarks added to your output, and no account or email required. All tools are free forever.

Does it work on mobile and tablet?

Yes. File Studio is fully responsive and works on Android and iOS browsers. All processing happens locally on your phone's or tablet's hardware.

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