Scan to PDF

Clean photographed pages and bind them into one PDF.

Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded — your input is processed on this device and discarded when you close the tab.

Your files

Drop scanned images or photos here or click to browse. Add up to 10 files, 50 MB in total. Everything is processed on this device only — no file is uploaded.

Clear list Build cleaned PDF

This tool is built for a familiar situation: the document exists only on paper, you photograph it page by page with a phone or a flatbed scanner, and the result is a set of grey, slightly crooked images that nobody wants to receive as loose attachments. Scan to PDF assembles those images into a single PDF, lets you turn each page the right way up, and cleans the pages up — most importantly a Document enhancement that pushes grey photographed paper toward clean white while keeping print and handwriting dark.

All of it happens in your browser. Your photographs are read from your device, adjusted in memory, placed one per page into a PDF, and returned as a single download. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for exactly the documents people scan most: identity papers, signed forms, medical letters and contracts.

How to use Scan to PDF

1. Add your scans or photos. Drop image files onto the dropzone or click to browse. On a phone, the file picker offers the camera, so you can photograph a page and add it immediately. Up to 10 images and 50 MB in total.
2. Check the thumbnails. Each image appears as a card in list order, and the list order is the page order of the PDF.
3. Rotate any sideways page. Each card has its own rotation control — 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees — because phone photos of portrait pages often arrive turned.
4. Choose an enhancement per page. Original keeps the pixels as they are, Greyscale removes colour using standard luminance weights, and Document applies the cleaning curve described below. Mixed batches are fine: a colour receipt can stay Original next to cleaned letter pages.
5. Build the cleaned PDF. Choose Build cleaned PDF and wait for the status line to confirm the page count.
6. Open the result and read a page at full size. Check the faintest handwriting or stamp survived the cleaning before you send the file anywhere; if it faded, rebuild that page with Greyscale instead of Document.

Features

• Per-image rotation in exact quarter turns, applied to the pixels before the page is built, so the result opens the right way up in every viewer.
• Three enhancement modes per image: Original, Greyscale (BT.601 luminance, so pure red becomes the grey value 76), and Document.
• The Document curve is fully specified, not a black box: greyscale first, then a levels stretch with a black point of 50 and a white point of 200, then a threshold-leaning gamma of 0.7 that lifts mid-tones toward white while the stretch has already pinned the extremes.
• One image per page, in list order, using the same page-sizing rule as the JPG to PDF tool on this site: one pixel becomes one PDF point, capped at 1,440 points per dimension.
• Up to 10 images and 50 MB per batch, enforced before anything is processed, with the actual totals reported if you exceed them.
• No account and no upload: photographs of your documents never leave your device.

Worked example

Take a 400 × 200 pixel photograph of a short note, shot sideways. Setting its rotation to 90 degrees swaps its effective size to 200 × 400 pixels, so its PDF page is 200 × 400 points, in portrait orientation. Now look at what Document mode does to three measured pixels from a typical phone photo. A paper pixel of grey 200 sits at the white point, so it becomes pure white, value 255. A printed ink pixel of grey 20 sits below the black point and becomes 0. A mid-grey shadow pixel of 128 is stretched to about 0.52 of the range and then lifted by the gamma curve to about 161 — visibly cleaner, but still grey rather than forced to black or white, which is why pencil writing survives. The automated tests for this tool assert each of these values, including the red-to-76 greyscale conversion.

Common errors and limitations

• There is no camera view inside the page: on phones you photograph pages through the file picker, and on desktop you add existing image files.
• There is no OCR. Cleaned pages are still pictures; their text cannot be searched, selected or copied.
• Enhancement cannot rescue everything: deep shadows, glare spots and very faint pencil can survive cleaning or, in Document mode, be pushed too far. The Greyscale mode is the safer choice for delicate originals.
• Cropping and straightening a skewed page (deskewing) are not offered; rotation is quarter turns only, so photograph pages as square-on as you can.
• At most 10 images and 50 MB per batch, and pages follow list order — there is no drag-to-reorder in this version.

• A page is upside down in the result. Its rotation was left at 0 while the photo itself was inverted. Fix: set that card's rotation to 180 degrees and rebuild.
• Faint handwriting disappeared. The Document curve pushed it past the white point. Fix: rebuild that page in Greyscale mode, which keeps every tone.
• The PDF pages are different sizes. That is expected: each page matches its own image, so a batch photographed at mixed resolutions produces mixed page sizes. Fix: if uniform pages matter, use the JPG to PDF tool's A4 layout instead.
• The batch was refused. More than 10 images or more than 50 MB in total. Fix: split the document into two batches and merge the resulting PDFs afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

Related PDF tools

Prefer everything on one page? The original PDF Toolkit merges, splits and rearranges with one shared file list. The full suite is indexed on the PDF Tools hub.

How it works

Open the Scan to PDF page and add up to 10 photographed or scanned pages, up to 50 MB in total. Everything runs in your browser — your images are never uploaded. You can rotate any page that came out sideways, and apply a document-cleaning enhancement that tidies up the look of photographed pages: the greyscale and document options reduce uneven lighting and background shadows so text stands out more clearly. Pages are then bound into a single multi-page PDF in the order you arranged them, ready to download and share. Your original photos are left unchanged, so enhancement is never destructive — if you dislike the cleaned result, you can run the same photos through again with a different setting.

Another worked example

Elena, a fictional tenant, needs to send her landlord a signed inventory form, a receipt, and two pages of handwritten notes. She photographs each page with her phone, adds the four images to the tool, and rotates one photo that came out sideways. She applies the document enhancement, which evens out the kitchen lighting shadows across the notes, and downloads a single 4-page PDF. The landlord receives one tidy document instead of four separate photos, and Elena still has the original photos on her phone if any page ever needs to be re-sent or re-read.

More limitations to know

Enhancement improves legibility; it cannot recover text that was blurry, cut off, or unreadable in the original photo, and it cannot fix a page photographed at a steep angle or in very poor light. The output pages are images, so the text inside them is not selectable or searchable — that needs an OCR step, which is a separate job. Handwriting that is faint or cramped will stay hard to read no matter the setting, and colours in the original photo may be muted by the greyscale option. The 10-page limit also means longer documents must be built in batches and combined afterwards. Always glance through the finished PDF before sending, especially at pages you photographed in a hurry.

More frequently asked questions

Can I use photos straight from my phone camera?

Yes. Take the photos first, then add them to the tool. For the best result, photograph each page flat, in even light, with all four corners visible.

What does the document enhancement actually do?

It cleans up the look of a photographed page — evening out lighting, reducing background shadows, and making text stand out — without changing your original photo.

Will the text in my finished PDF be searchable?

No. The pages are images of your photos. Searchable text requires an OCR pass, which turns pictures of text into real text.

How many pages can I bind into one PDF?

Up to 10 pages per run. For a longer document, build it in batches and merge the resulting PDFs afterwards.

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