Scan a passport with your phone
A passport page has one enemy: glare. The laminate that protects it reflects any direct light straight back at the lens, and a white patch across the photograph or the machine readable lines is the usual reason a submission gets bounced. Everything else about this job is ordinary document scanning.
What the office is checking
Whoever receives the file needs the whole page, edge to edge, with all four corners visible and nothing cropped. They need the photograph clear, the printed details legible, and the two lines of machine readable text along the bottom sharp enough to read character by character.
They also usually want one page per file or one document with the pages in order, not six separate pictures in an email. That is what the PDF step below is for.
Beating the glare
Turn the flash off. A flash on a laminated page produces a white disc exactly where the detail is, every time. Use ordinary indirect daylight instead, near a window but not in direct sun.
Then move rather than adjusting settings. Tilt the passport a few degrees, or move yourself so the light source is not reflecting into the lens, and watch the preview as you go. The reflection moves as you move, so you can see the moment it leaves the page.
Getting the geometry right
Hold the passport open and flat. Passports resist this, so press the spine or weigh the far edge down with something outside the frame. A page that curves at the spine goes out of focus where it bends, which is often exactly where the details are.
Shoot square on, with the phone parallel to the page, and fill the frame with the passport page. Do not zoom with your fingers, because that throws away pixels. Move the phone closer instead.
Build the PDF
Open Images to PDF and add the pictures in the order the office asked for. One image becomes one page. Choose A4 or Letter rather than match, because an office files and prints these, and a page the exact shape of a passport photograph looks like a mistake.
The JPG to PDF page covers the plain photograph case and points at the same tool until its own preset ships. Nothing is uploaded at any point, which matters more for an identity document than for most files.
Take the document properties out
A PDF carries fields you never typed: an author name, the software that produced it, and creation and modification times. Run the finished file through the privacy scan, which lists what the document says about you and removes what you choose.
That covers the PDF's own fields. It does not read what a photograph carries inside itself, so if location data on your pictures concerns you, clear it in the phone gallery before you build the document.
Size and sending
Upload forms often cap attachments at a few megabytes, and two full resolution phone photographs will exceed that. Compress the finished PDF to the size the form asks for rather than reshooting at a lower quality, because you keep control of what is readable.
Photographed paper compresses well: on the public bench run, scan type documents met their requested size on 88.9% of cases. Check the result at normal zoom afterwards, and check the machine readable lines specifically, since that is the part that has to survive.
Afterwards
Delete the working copies once the submission is accepted. A passport scan in a downloads folder, a synced photo library and a chat thread is three copies you did not mean to keep, and identity documents are worth being fussy about.
The general phone scanning guide covers light and framing in more detail, and the scanning hub lists the rest of the cluster.
Questions people ask
- How do I photograph a passport without glare?
- Turn the flash off and use indirect daylight. Then tilt the passport or move yourself until the reflection leaves the page, watching the preview as you go. Settings will not fix glare, but moving will.
- Should a passport scan be one page or several?
- Follow what the office asked for. If they did not say, put the pages in order in one PDF rather than sending separate pictures, which is what most of them want anyway.
- What page size should I use for an identity document?
- A4 or Letter, because the file gets printed and filed. Match sizes the page to the photograph itself, which produces an odd shaped page that looks like an error.
- Does the PDF carry my name or my phone details?
- The PDF carries document properties such as an author name, the producing software and timestamps. The privacy scan lists and removes those. Clear location data on the photographs themselves in your gallery, since that sits inside the picture rather than in the PDF.
- Should I send the scan as a PDF or as a photo?
- Send the PDF. One file arrives in one piece, it opens the same way on every device, and the page size tells the reader how the document should print. A loose photo can be rotated or resized by whatever app forwards it.
Do it now
The tool runs in this browser. Your file never leaves the machine, and the result is checked before you download it.
JPG to PDFWhere to go next
- JPG to PDF Turn photos or scans into one PDF, in page order.
- PDF privacy scan See what a PDF says about you before you send it to a stranger.
- Scan documents with your phone Turn a phone photo into a document scan that looks like a scan.
- Scan a document to PDF Find the right guide for turning a phone photo into a scan.