Many times we are asked to send scanned photos of our passport or ID. If you don’t have a scanner, you can use your phone to scan documents and even send them as PDFs.
Surely you thought that taking a photo of your ID is enough, well no. Many companies need documents to go through a scanner, since the document must be free of glare, reflections, edges, among other details. Given this, we suggest the application available for Android and iOS, “CamScanner”.
This app uses the phone’s camera to scan, but it goes beyond taking a simple photo.
How to use this app?
1. Take a good photo of the document
If it is not laminated, it should be as horizontal and less wrinkled as possible. Lighting is also important, avoid shadows and unwanted glare.
2. Crop the scanning surface
It is difficult for the photo to cover only the document. You will always see the edge of a table, or the surface on which you have the scanned document. CamScanner automatically detects which part of the image belongs to the document and which part to delete. In any case, you can go into detail and adjust the trim until it’s perfect.
3.Adjust the highlight
You can change the color, contrast, and brightness settings.
4.Scan multiple documents
If you have multi-page documents, you can add more sheets and combine them all into the same document and send them all together, as a PDF.
5.Share the document
Once the document has been scanned, you can export it as a PDF and send it to your recipient by email, among other options.
Here are some additional tips for scanning documents with your phone:
- Use a clean, flat surface to scan your documents.
- Avoid scanning documents that are wrinkled or folded.
- If you’re scanning a multi-page document, scan each page separately and then combine them into a single PDF.
- Use a document scanning app that offers features like optical character recognition (OCR), which will allow you to search and edit the text in your scanned documents.
Here are some of the best document scanning apps for Android and iOS:
- CamScanner
- Google Drive
- Adobe Scan
- Microsoft Office Lens
- Genius Scan