Scan multiple pages into one PDF

Shoot the pages first

Put the paper on a plain surface with light coming from the side rather than from behind you, so your own shadow does not fall across the sheet. Hold the phone parallel to the page and fill the frame with it. A page shot at an angle is readable to you and awkward for anybody else, because the text runs downhill and the margins are uneven.

Shoot every sheet in order and do not stop halfway to check. Counting at the end is faster than working out later which of forty photographs is missing.

Turn the set into one document

Open Images to PDF and add all the photographs at once. Each image becomes one page. Drag the thumbnails into the right order before you build the file, because file names sort as text and put IMG_10 ahead of IMG_2.

Choose A4 or Letter as the page size for anything that will be printed, filed or sent to an office. Match, which sizes each page to its own image, is the right choice only for something that will be read on a screen. The JPG to PDF page describes the plain photograph case and sends you to this same tool until its own preset ships.

Nothing is resampled. The pixels from the camera go into the PDF as they are, which is why the file can be large and why the next section exists.

Scan with Notes on an iPhone

The Notes app on an iPhone has a document scanner built in, reached from the attachment control inside a note. It finds the edges of the sheet, corrects the perspective and keeps asking for the next page, so a stack of paper becomes one scan with one page per sheet. When you save it, the scan is a single PDF that you can share to Files, mail or any other app.

Because it writes one multi page file, there is nothing to merge afterwards. If you scanned the pages in separate sessions, you get separate PDFs, and those go through the merge tool as described below.

Scan with Google Drive on Android

Google Drive on Android includes a scanner behind its new file control, and it works on any Android phone regardless of maker. It captures a page, offers to add the next, and saves the set as one PDF straight into your Drive. From there the file downloads to the phone like any other.

The output is a PDF of page images. Text on it is not selectable unless the app ran text recognition, and the version you have decides that, so check by trying to select a line before you send it somewhere that needs searchable text.

Scan with the Samsung camera

A Samsung phone detects a sheet of paper in the camera frame and offers to scan it. The result is one corrected image per sheet, saved to the gallery, rather than one multi page file. So the camera route ends where this guide starts: a set of pictures that Images to PDF turns into one document. The Samsung guide covers the prompt and what to do when it does not appear.

If your scanner app already made PDFs

Some scanning apps write one PDF per sheet rather than one image per sheet. Those are already PDFs, so they go through the merge tool instead, in the order you set on the page.

The result is the same document either way. What differs is that merging PDFs copies pages whole, so anything the app already did to the image, straightening, cropping, contrast, is carried across untouched.

The file will be big

Forty photographs from a modern phone is a PDF somewhere near 150 MB, which no mail system accepts. Compress the finished document as one step rather than shrinking each photograph first, so the pictures go through image encoding once.

A photographed page has room to give, because camera resolution is far above the 150 dpi the compress tool keeps. A phone photo of a page comes down from about 2.7 MB to about 73 KB at the default setting, and to about 18 KB at the smallest.

Checking before you send it

Open the finished PDF and read one line on every page at normal zoom. If you cannot read a line, neither can the person receiving it, and reshooting one sheet now is cheaper than being asked for the whole document again. Check the page count against the paper stack before you close the tool.

The image combining guide covers page size and margin choices in more detail, and the phone scanning guide covers getting a photograph to look like a scan rather than a snapshot.

Scans you already have, and two pages on one sheet

This guide is for paper that still has to be scanned. If the scanning is done and what you have is a folder of PDFs from different sessions or different people, you want to merge scans you already have, which is a different job with its own guide, including how to keep the file size down afterwards.

A third request hides behind the same words: two scanned sheets printed side by side on one page, so a booklet of receipts or a pair of small forms shares a sheet. That is a layout job. Scan two pages onto one page covers it, and N-up PDF is the tool that draws the pages onto the new sheet. The merge hub lists the rest of the cluster.

Crop and straighten before you build

Fix the photographs while they are still photographs. Every phone gallery can crop to the edge of the sheet and rotate a few degrees, and doing it there takes seconds per page.

Once the images are inside a PDF that work is much harder, because a page is not an image any more. Cropping then means changing the visible area of the whole page rather than the picture on it, and straightening a page that was shot at an angle is not something any PDF tool does. Five minutes in the gallery saves rebuilding the document.