Scan a document with your phone and turn it into a PDF

Take a good photo of each page

• Lay the page flat on a table, ideally on something darker than the paper, so the edges stand out.
• Use daylight from a window, or a bright room. Avoid standing between the light and the page, which casts your shadow over it.
• Hold the phone straight above the page, parallel to it, not at an angle. Tilted photos make the text look slanted.
• Fill the screen with the page, leaving only a thin border around it.
• Tap the screen on the text to focus, and hold still for a moment.
• Skip the flash on glossy paper: it leaves a white glare that hides words.
• Take one photo per page, then zoom in on each to check that the small print is readable.

Turn the photos into a PDF

1. 1Open Images to PDF on your phone and tap to choose files. On many phones the chooser also lets you take a photo straight away.
2. 2Pick all the page photos at once. Each one becomes a page.
3. 3Check the order: open the thumbnails with the button at the left of the toolbar, then press and hold a thumbnail for a moment and drag it into place.
4. 4Rotate any page that came out sideways with the buttons under it.
5. 5Open Page settings. For a document, A4 with Small margins looks like a scanned page. Keep Quality on Standard to send it by message or email, or choose High if the text is very small.
6. 6Tap Download.

Before you send it

• Give it a clear name: tap the document name at the top and type something like lease-2026 instead of a camera file name.
• Need to sign it? Switch to Sign at the top, add your signature and tap Apply.
• Sending from your phone? Open More and choose Share to attach it to an email or a message directly.
• Scanned a whole stack at once? You can split it into separate files later with Split into files in the More menu.

Private by design

Scans are often of sensitive papers: identity cards, payslips, bank letters. PDF Tools never uploads them. The photos are turned into a PDF on your phone. The open document is kept for the browser tab only, so a reload doesn’t lose your work, and closing the tab clears it from the device. That matters if you ever scan on a borrowed or shared phone.