For those digitizing items with smartphone photos, mobile scanning apps offer enhanced clarity and functionality. Adobe Scan, is an excellent choice, is efficient, free, and delivers high-quality scans with excellent editing features, especially for PDF users. The Scanner App, available at https://scanner.biz/, is another great tool to consider.
Depending on your platform, Microsoft Lens and Google Drive’s scanning feature are also great options. iPhone or iPad users can utilize built-in scanning in Apple Notes. All these apps are free, aiding in organizing scans both online and offline.
Adobe Scan
Adobe Scan, available for Android and iOS, excels at capturing various documents like receipts, tax forms, and business cards. It’s free, user-friendly, and includes editing features to enhance scan quality beyond that of other scanning apps.
Every scan is automatically stored on Adobe Document Cloud, and it seamlessly integrates with Adobe Reader. This integration makes it easy to convert paper into PDFs that can be opened on any device for sharing, signing, and commenting. Additionally, scans can be saved as JPEG image files.
Those interested in extra features can opt for the Adobe Scan Premium subscription, priced at $10 per month, which offers additional storage, the ability to save files as Word or PowerPoint documents, and password protection. However, the free version will likely suffice for most users.
Scanner App
Transform your iPhone or iPad into a mobile scanner with the Scanner App, featuring advanced PDF conversion, OCR, and handwriting recognition. Easily scan, edit, and share documents as high-quality PDFs or JPGs. The app offers automatic and manual capture modes, edge detection, and color corrections.
Key features include digital signatures, OCR, and cloud integration without needing an internet connection. Check it out at Scanner App. Subscription options range from $5.99 per week to $39.99 annually.
Microsoft Lens
If you appreciate the simplicity and cost-free nature of Adobe Scan but frequently work within the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft Lens (available on Android and iOS) is an excellent choice. Like Adobe Scan, its user interface is minimalistic; however, it offers diverse output options including Word documents, OneNote notes, and PowerPoint slides, alongside PDFs and JPEGs.
Although it lacks organizational features and does not auto-scan documents, its superior text recognition and well-formatted outputs compensate for these limitations. Microsoft Lens also provides additional useful features, such as the ability to save scans in multiple locations and adjust file size and resolution.
For OCR (Optical Character Recognition, which allows text in an image to be searchable and editable), you’ll need to save the scans to Word for viewing.
Google Drive
While Google Drive is primarily known as a cloud-storage solution for Google Docs and Sheets, it also functions as an impressive scanning app on Android and iOS. It delivers essential features like a straightforward interface, effective edge detection, and reliable text recognition, plus added benefits such as prefilled file names and a shadow-removal filter.
Although Adobe Scan and Microsoft Lens offer more editing tools and a wider range of save formats, Google Drive is a practical choice for quick PDF scans that are automatically saved to the cloud, especially if you already manage most of your files there.
Note that on iOS, the resulting PDFs have selectable text, allowing for copy-pasting elsewhere, a feature absent on Android. For OCR results with Google Drive, the documents must be opened in Google Docs.
Apple Notes
For iPhone users, Apple Notes is not only a convenient place for jotting down important information but also a robust mobile scanning app. If your scanning needs are occasional—like receipts, business cards, or homework—you might not require an additional app.
Similar to Adobe Scan and Google Drive, Apple Notes automatically saves your scans to the cloud (iCloud), ensuring accessibility across devices, and performs accurate OCR by default. However, it has a few drawbacks: it cannot export searchable PDFs and is limited to exporting only PDFs and raw text.