In short
- Even light, a contrasting background and a flat page do most of the work.
- Let the app find the edges, then check the corners before saving.
- Black & white for text, magic for wrinkles, color when colour matters.
- Scan every page into one document, name it well and export as PDF.
Why a photo isn’t a scan
Taking a photo of a page seems like the obvious shortcut, but the result is rarely something you’d want to send. The page is tilted, so the text lines slope. The background of the desk shows around the edges. A shadow from your hand or phone falls across one corner, and the white paper comes out grey or yellow because the camera balances the whole scene, not just the page.
A document scanner app fixes all of that. It finds the four corners of the page, corrects the perspective so the page is a flat rectangle, crops the background away and then cleans up the colours so the paper looks white and the text looks black. The result is a file that reads like it came from a flatbed scanner, and it is usually much smaller than the original photo.
Before you scan: light, background and angle
Most scanning problems are solved before you press the shutter:
- Use even light. Daylight from a window or a ceiling light is better than a single desk lamp. Avoid the phone’s flash on glossy paper; it creates a bright hotspot that hides text.
- Pick a contrasting background. White paper on a dark table makes the edges easy to detect. White on white (a page on a white desk) is the hardest case.
- Hold the phone parallel to the page. Perspective correction can fix a tilt, but the less it has to fix, the sharper the text stays.
- Watch your shadow. Stand so the light is not behind you. A filter can flatten soft shadows, but a hard shadow edge across the text is harder to remove.
- Flatten the paper. Unfold letters and press down creased pages. A magic-style filter helps with wrinkles, but a flatter page always gives a better result.
Step by step: scan to PDF with Scansy
Here is the whole flow in Scansy, which works offline and keeps every page on your phone.
- Open Scansy and start a new scan. Point the camera at the page. Scansy detects the edges of the page automatically.
- Check the crop. If a corner landed in the wrong place (for example on a folded corner or a busy background), drag it to the right spot. This manual crop adjust is worth a second of your time on important documents.
- Choose a filter. The magic filter flattens shadows and creases on wrinkled paper. Black & white is ideal for text-only pages and gives the smallest files. Grayscale keeps pencil marks and faint stamps. Color is for forms with coloured sections, photos and receipts where colour matters.
- Add more pages. For a contract, a bank statement or a multi-page form, keep scanning into the same document so it becomes a single multi-page PDF.
- Name it and file it. Give the document a name you’ll search for later and put it in a folder.
- Export as PDF. Export the document as a PDF (or as JPG images if someone asked for pictures), and share it to email, a messaging app or any other app on your phone.
Already took a photo of the page? Import it from your gallery and Scansy will treat it like a fresh scan, with edge detection, crop adjust and filters.
Making the text usable
A scan is an image, so by default you can’t copy text out of it. Scansy runs text recognition (OCR) on your phone, so you can select and copy text from a scanned page and search across your documents. Because recognition happens on the device, the image is never sent to a server to be read, which matters when the page is a passport, a medical letter or a payslip.
OCR accuracy depends on the scan: sharp focus, even light and a flat page make the biggest difference. Printed text is read far more reliably than handwriting.
Which settings for which document
| Document | Filter | Tip |
|---|---|---|
| Letters, contracts, printed forms | Black & white or magic | Smallest files, crisp text |
| Wrinkled or folded paper | Magic | Flatten the page by hand first |
| ID cards and passports | Color | Avoid glare on laminated surfaces |
| Receipts | Grayscale | Thermal paper fades; scan early |
| Pencil notes, sketches | Grayscale | Keeps light strokes visible |
After you scan
A few habits keep a phone full of scans useful. Name documents by what you’ll search for (“Lease 2026”, “Car insurance”) rather than the date. Use folders for the big categories such as home, work, health and tax. If a PDF is too big to email, compress it before sending. If it contains personal details, consider locking it with a password.
Finally, remember where your scans live. With Scansy they stay on your phone, so export copies of documents you can’t afford to lose to somewhere you trust.