Photograph a document with your camera and get a clean, scan-like PDF — several pages, straightened up and whitened, in one file. Free in your browser — no sign-up, no watermarks.
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The scanner is at the office and the form is due today. A phone photo of the page technically works and looks like what it is: grey paper, a colour cast from the room lighting, and a shadow across one corner. The difference between a photo and a scan is mostly that a scanner knows the background is supposed to be white. Measuring the paper level in the photograph and stretching the brightness so that level becomes white gets most of the way there — and several pages become one PDF, which is what the person asking for the document actually wants.
Decoded Base64 data isn’t always the same file type, so this tool doesn’t assume one: it inspects the decoded bytes for the real image signature — PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, WebP or ICO — and names the downloaded file with the correct extension automatically.
PDF is the universal document format: it locks layout, fonts and images so a file looks identical on every device and printer. Scans, invoices, forms, e-books and reports all travel as PDF. Because a PDF is a container rather than an image, turning its pages into JPG or PNG pictures — or bundling pictures into a PDF — are among the most common file tasks there are.
| Image | ||
|---|---|---|
| Type | Raster image | Document |
| Compression | Depends on detected format | Mixed (per object) |
| Transparency | Depends on detected format | — |
| Animation | Depends on detected format | — |
| Typical use | Whatever format was originally encoded | Documents, scans, invoices, forms |
Someone needs a signed form today and the scanner is in an office you are not in. A photo of the page is technically the same information and looks nothing like a scan: the paper comes out grey or faintly beige, the room lighting leaves a colour cast, and there is a shadow across one corner from your own hand holding the phone.
None of that is the camera being bad. A camera exposes for the whole scene and reproduces what it sees, and what it sees is a sheet of paper lit by a ceiling light. A scanner has one advantage: it knows the background is supposed to be white.
That knowledge can be recovered from the photograph. Sample the brightness across the image and take a high percentile — most of a page is paper, so that value is the paper — then stretch the range so it becomes white. The ink is far darker and stays dark. On a typical indoor photo this takes the paper from a dull 173 to 255 and the text from 78 to 0.
Measuring rather than using a fixed threshold is what stops the two classic failures: a dim photo turning into a black rectangle, and an already-bright scan being bleached into a blank page. Each image is judged on its own.
Grey is the default and suits ordinary printed text. Colour keeps the ink, stamps and highlighter while still whitening the page — use it for anything where a colour carries meaning. Black and white throws away every shade and produces the smallest file, which is right for clean printed text and wrong for anything with a photograph or a faint pencil signature on it. Straight photo turns the clean-up off entirely.
A page held by hand is never quite square to the camera, and crooked text is the clearest sign that something was photographed rather than scanned. The angle is measured from the text itself — when a page is level, the ink adds up into sharp rows with gaps between them, and a tilt smears those rows together — so each capture is straightened by the amount it is actually out by, up to about eight degrees. A page that is already straight is left alone.
It will not crop away the desk around the page, so fill the viewfinder with the page. It corrects a tilt, not perspective: photographing a page from an angle rather than from above makes it trapezoid, and no amount of rotation fixes that — shoot from directly overhead. If the edges need trimming afterwards, Crop PDF does it.
Nothing touches the camera until you press the button, and the stream is stopped the moment you close the viewfinder or leave the page. The photographs are never uploaded — the pages are assembled into the PDF in this browser tab. If you would rather not grant camera access at all, take the photos with your normal camera app and add them through the file picker; they get exactly the same treatment.
Yes — completely free, with no sign-up, no watermarks and no daily quota. Processing happens in this browser, so the practical limit is the memory available on your device.
Yes. Select or drop as many files as you like — each one is converted in sequence with its own progress status, and you can download the results individually or all together as a ZIP archive.
No. Photos you have already taken can be added with the file picker like any other image, and get the same clean-up. The camera is there because photographing straight into the tool saves the round trip through your photo library.
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