In the digital age, the need for physical paperwork is rapidly diminishing. Whether you’re a student, a business professional, or just someone trying to declutter their life, document scanning apps can help you transition to a paperless lifestyle.
These apps not only allow you to scan and save your documents in a digital format, but also offer features like OCR (Optical Character Recognition), file editing, and cloud storage.
In this article, we will explore the top 5 iPhone apps for scanning documents, helping you to digitize your paperwork with ease and efficiency.
From Adobe Scan’s seamless integration with other Adobe apps to CamScanner’s advanced editing features, these apps offer a range of capabilities to suit your needs. So, let’s dive in and discover how these apps can streamline your digital workflow.
Adobe Scan
Adobe Scan is a dedicated scanning app from Adobe, the creators of the PDF file. It runs on your mobile device and uses your camera to capture a copy of a document to convert into a PDF file. It offers a preview option to optimize the file dimensions, and you can rotate, crop, and edit the color as required.
The biggest advantage of Adobe Scan is its close integration with Adobe’s other apps, including Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Fill & Sign. This means you can not only scan into PDF document format, but also edit, annotate, sign, and work collaboratively with the documents that you do scan. Adobe Scan is free to download and use, though there is an in-app subscription available if you want additional features.
Abbyy FineReader PDF
Abbyy’s FineReader PDF is a software that uses optical character recognition to scan text in 193 languages. Compatible with Android and iOS, the app lets you scan both printed and handwritten text with your mobile device. FineReader works with 12 file formats, including DOCX, PDF, and TXT.
The app preserves the original document formatting and allows you to add signatures and notes to text. The iOS version of the software sports a feature called BookScan, which lets you digitize books with ease. It turns facing book pages into separate images, removing any defects. FineReader is free to download on Android and iOS devices, but it offers in-app purchases if you’d like to get more storage and capabilities.
Genius Scan
Genius Scan is a popular mobile scanning app that lets you turn paper-based documents into JPG and PDF files. It includes smart page detection, perspective correction, and image enhancement. With patch scanning, you can create digital copies of dozens of pages within seconds.
The app also enhances the legibility of documents, ensuring they’re readable, and you can keep your files organized with titles, tags, and a search function. Genius Scan supports a range of cloud storage platforms, including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and more. If you’re scanning sensitive documents, you can protect them with built-in encryption and passwords. It’s free to download on Android and iOS, but offers in-app purchases.
SwiftScan
SwiftScan is an easy and fast way to create high-quality scans on iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. With the software, you can scan documents, receipts, sketches, whiteboards, business cards, labels, QR codes, and barcodes. Once you’ve scanned an item, you can choose from five color modes to make it look perfect.
There are also tools to crop and optimize scanned documents, all of which are automatically captured in 200+ dpi. SwiftScan supports iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon Drive, Slack, Todolist, OneDrive, OneNote, and Box. SwiftScan is free to download on Android and iOS, with the option of in-app purchases.
CamScanner
CamScanner is an app that turns the camera of your mobile device into a document scanner. With it, you’re able to scan a range of documents, from invoices to receipts. The software turns scanned documents into PDF files, which are automatically uploaded to cloud services such as Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, and OneDrive.
The app lets you invite colleagues to view and comment on scans. There’s also an advanced editing feature, which lets you add annotations and watermarks to documents, making them look more professional. For improved security, you can add passcodes to documents. The app is free to download on Android and iOS but you can upgrade to a premium plan to get 10GB of storage, send document links with password protection, batch download documents, and more.