A free PDF scanner for your iPhone

How to use Scanfone as a PDF scanner on iPhone

1. Open Scanfone and tap Scan.
2. Hold your iPhone over the page. Apple's document camera finds the edges and captures the page.
3. Keep scanning to add more pages to the same PDF, then tap Save.
4. Pick a filter (Original, Color, Gray or Black & white), rotate, reorder or delete pages if you need to.
5. Save the PDF to a folder, share it, print it or save it to Files.

What a PDF scanner app should do

A PDF scanner has one job: turn a piece of paper into a file you can send, store and find again. That sounds simple, and with an iPhone it is. The camera is good enough, and Apple's document camera already finds the edges of a page and straightens it out so it looks flat instead of photographed at an angle.

The hard part was never the scanning. It is everything around it: the app that lets you scan ten pages and then asks for a subscription when you tap Save, the banner ad sitting on top of your tax form, the account you have to create before you can export a single receipt. Scanfone skips all of that. Scanning, saving, sharing and printing are free and unlimited, with no ads and no account.

From paper to PDF in a few seconds

Open the app, tap Scan and hold the phone over the page. Scanfone uses Apple's document camera, so edge detection and perspective correction happen right away. Add as many pages as you like to build a multi-page PDF: a contract, a stack of invoices, a school worksheet or a twelve-page lease.

Before you save, clean things up. Choose a filter: Original keeps the page as it looks, Color brightens it, Gray gives a neutral look and Black & white makes text crisp for printing and faxing-style documents. Rotate a page that came out sideways, drag pages into the right order or delete the one where your thumb got in the shot.

Searchable PDFs, not just pictures of paper

Plenty of scanner apps produce a PDF that is really just a photo wrapped in a file. You cannot search it or copy a sentence out of it. Scanfone runs text recognition (OCR) on your iPhone for every scan, so the PDF becomes searchable and you can select and copy the text.

That also means you can search across all your documents from inside the app, including the words on the pages. Looking for the warranty that mentions a serial number, or the letter from your landlord about the deposit? Type a word and it turns up. Read more on the OCR text recognition page or follow the guide on how to make a PDF searchable.

More than documents

Scanfone has dedicated scan modes for the paper that does not look like a letter:

• Documents: letters, contracts, forms, receipts and notes.
• ID card: scan the front and the back, and both sides are placed on one page. See the ID card scanner.
• Passport: a mode made for the photo page. See the passport scanner.
• QR code reader: point and read. See the QR code scanner.

Edit and convert the PDF afterwards

Once a scan is a PDF, you usually need to do something with it. These tools are free in Scanfone: sign a PDF with a saved signature, add text, add a watermark, add page numbers or footer text, redact areas you want to hide, and merge, split or compress PDFs.

You can also import photos and existing PDFs, convert JPG to PDF, PDF to JPG and PDF to text. Exporting to Word or PowerPoint is part of Pro, see PDF to Word.

Private by design

Scanning and text recognition happen on the phone. Nothing is uploaded unless you turn on Pro sync. There are no ads, no tracking and no analytics, which is a nice change for an app that is going to see your bank statements. If some documents need extra protection, put them in the Safe, a folder locked with a PIN and Face ID.

Free, and the one small catch

Free PDFs get one small line under each page that says "Scanned free with Scanfone". It sits below your content, never on top of it. If you would rather not have it, Scanfone Pro removes the line and adds sync between your phones, 1 TB cloud backup on EU servers and Word/PowerPoint export. It costs $2.99 for the first year, then $19.99 a year. No weekly plans, and you cancel in one tap. Details are on the pricing page.

Related pages