Scan a multi-page document with your phone

Pick a route before the first shot

Daniela is remortgaging. Her broker wants the signed 9-page offer letter and three months of payslips as PDFs by 4 pm, and his mailbox bounces anything over 10 MB. She has an Android phone, a kitchen table and no scanner. Twelve sheets is too many to improvise.

Scanners hiding in Notes, Files and Drive

On an iPhone, open a note in Notes, tap the attachment button in the toolbar (a camera or a paperclip, depending on the iOS version) and choose the document-scanning option. It finds the sheet's edges, captures it and waits for the next. Feed it every page, tap the save option, then share the scan as a PDF. The Files app has the same scanner in the folder’s menu of additional options, and it saves the PDF straight into that folder.

On Android, Google Drive has a Scan option, reached from the New button or a camera icon depending on the version. Add each sheet from the review screen and save once at the end, so all twelve pages land in a single PDF. Samsung phones have their own scanner in the camera, which the Samsung guide walks through.

Two things to watch. If the app offers a filter, choose colour or greyscale for anything signed or stamped, because a harsh black-and-white filter can erase blue ink and pencil notes. And scans made in Drive are stored in your Google account, while Notes syncs through iCloud when that is switched on, so sensitive papers end up in the cloud unless you delete them.

Shooting the set with the plain camera

When there is no scanner app, the camera does the job. Pull the staples, lay each sheet on a dark, matte surface by a window, and hold the phone flat above it so the page fills the frame with a thin border of table showing. Keep the same height for every sheet.

Shoot in reading order. For double-sided paper, take the front and then the back of each sheet before moving on, so the camera roll already matches the document. Count the photos against the stack before you put the paper away.

Check the format. An iPhone saves photos as HEIC by default; setting the camera format to Most Compatible in Settings switches it to JPG. Android cameras normally save JPG unless a high-efficiency option has been switched on. Mixing both in one set costs an extra step later. For a single passport page, glare and code lines matter more than order, and the passport guide covers that case.

Join the photos into one PDF in your browser

1. Open JPG to PDF on the phone or on a computer that has the photos. It accepts JPG and PNG. For iPhone HEIC photos, use HEIC to PDF instead; the controls are the same.
2. Tap Choose images and select every page in one go.
3. Read the list from top to bottom. PDFGym keeps the order the files arrive in and never sorts them by name, and a photo picker does not always hand them over in shooting order. Move a page with its up and down arrows, and drop a duplicate with the remove button.
4. Choose the page fit: Match image, A4 or US Letter, and a margin of None, Narrow or Standard.
5. Tap Create PDF. The result is reopened and its page count, page sizes and picture dimensions are checked before Download PDF appears.
6. Name it so the recipient knows what it is, such as Daniela_Ruiz_offer_letter_signed.pdf.

Each tool takes one family of formats, so a set that mixes HEIC and JPG files has to be built as two PDFs and then joined with Merge PDF. Shooting everything in one format avoids that step.

Page shape, margins and megabytes

Match image makes every page the exact shape of its photo, which is fine on a screen but prints at odd sizes. A4 or US Letter shrinks each photo onto a fixed paper size with even space around it; a wide photo gets a sideways page. US Letter is the norm in the US and Canada, A4 almost everywhere else. Narrow adds a quarter inch of white around the picture and Standard half an inch, without cropping anything.

Size follows the photos. JPG to PDF places each JPG in the file byte for byte, so twelve 4 MB photos make a PDF of roughly 48 MB. HEIC to PDF decodes each photo and stores it as a high-quality JPEG, which is often heavier than the HEIC was. Either way, for Daniela's 10 MB limit the next stop is Compress PDF: type the limit into the target box, then zoom into the preview to make sure the small print is still readable.

Phone scan problems and their fixes

• Page 7 sits before page 6. Reorder with the arrows before you create the PDF. If you only notice afterwards, rearrange the finished file instead of shooting again.
• One page lies on its side. The tool applies the rotation your camera recorded, but a phone held flat can record the wrong one. Rotate that page in the finished PDF.
• A thumb or a shadow on one sheet. Reshoot only that sheet, swap the photo in the list and create the PDF again.
• The signature has vanished. A black-and-white scanner filter bleached the ink. Scan again in colour or greyscale.
• The scanner app saved one PDF per sheet. Those are finished PDFs already, so merge them in order rather than converting them again.
• Nobody can search the text. A photo of a page holds pixels, not characters, and these converters do not run text recognition. Ask whether the recipient needs a typed version.

Times to put the phone down

If the request says certified copy, original document or in-person check, a home scan will not count, however clean it looks.

For forty pages or more, a copier with a document feeder at the office, a library or a print shop is faster and gives every page the same geometry. So it is for bound books and large drawings. And if the bank, school or agency offers its own upload app, use it: it may check things a plain PDF cannot.