Camscanner for laptop Archives

In this day and age, only rarely is physical paperwork a necessity. The best document scanning apps can help you transition to a paperless office, converting paperwork into PDFs for digital or online document storage.

However, for document scanning you don't need to invest in OCR software and hardware but can instead simply use apps that are readily available for mobile devices.

This means being able to scan anything from work invoices to receipts, and the beauty of scanning apps is that they don't just create a PDF copy, but also allow you to edit the file as required before saving - that way you really do have only a copy of your documents and the information you need from them.

Some apps offer additional services, often for a small fee, in order to allow you to do even more with your scanned files. This might include document editing and management and/or cloud storage to help you better manage your digital archives.

Here we'll look at a range of the best document scanning apps currently available. 

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Best document scanning apps - at a glance

1. Adobe Scan
2. Abbyy FineScanner
3. Genius Scan
4. Scanbot
5. CamScanner

When it comes to scanning documents for digital file storage, chances are you are going to want to save in a portable document format-a PDF file. Adobe Scan is a dedicated scanning app from Adobe, the creators of the PDF file, so expectations are high that this should deliver on most user needs.

Adobe Scan runs as an app on your mobile device, whether it is running Android or iOS and uses your camera to catch a copy of a document to convert into a PDF file. There is a preview option to optimize the file dimensions, and you can rotate, crop, and edit the colour as required.

The biggest advantage of using Adobe Scan is probably its close integration with Adobe's other apps, not least Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Fill & Sign. This means you can not only scan into PDF document format, but also edit, annotate, sign and work collaboratively with the documents that you do scan. 

Even better, Adobe Scan is a free app to download and use, though there is an in-app subscription available if you want additional features. Cost for this is a monthly subscription of $9.99 per month or $89.99 a year

If you’re looking for something a little more advanced, it’s worth checking out Abbyy’s FineScanner. The software uses optical character recognition to scan text in 193 languages.    

Compatible with Android and iOS, the app lets you scan both printed and handwritten text with your mobile device. FineScanner works with 12 file formats, including DOCX, PDF and TXT. The great thing about the app is that it preserves the original document formatting.   

What’s more, you can access a set of easy-to-use annotation tools to add signatures and notes to text. And the iOS version of the software sports a feature called BookScan, which lets you digitize books with ease. It turns facing book pages into separate images, removing any defects. 

Once you’ve conducted a scan, you can share it with anyone over email or save it to cloud storage lockers such as Dropbox, Evernote and iCloud Drive. Currently, FineScanner is free to download on Android and iOS devices, but it offers in-app purchases if you’d like to get more storage and capabilities.   

Genius Scan is yet another popular mobile scanning app, with its developers claiming that the software has digitized more than half a billion documents to date. Described as a “scanner in your pocket”, it lets you turn paper-based documents into JPG and PDF files.   

Headline features include smart page detection, perspective correction and image enhancement. And with patch scanning, you can create digital copies of dozens of pages within seconds. The app also enhances the legibility of documents, ensuring they’re readable, and you can keep your files organized with titles, tags and a search function. 

Just like FineScanner, you can upload scanned documents to a range of cloud storage platforms, including Dropbox, Evernote, Expensify, Facebook, Google Drive, OneDrive (and OneDrive for Business), OneNote, FTP, SugarSync and WebDAV.

If you’re scanning sensitive documents, you can protect them with built-in encryption and passwords (or Touch ID on iOS). It’s free to download on Android and iOS, but offers in-app purchases.   

The app is free and comes with a lot of features. For the more advanced integrations and security and MDM settings, there's a one-time fee of $7.99. For unlimited cloud storage, plus synchronization and web access through Genius Cloud, there's a monthly fee of $2.99 per month.

Scanbot is positioned as an easy and fast way to create high-quality scans on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. According to the developer behind the app, it is capable of making “hundreds of decisions to capture the document perfectly”. 

With the software, you can scan documents, receipts, sketches, whiteboards, business cards, labels, QR codes and barcodes. Once you’ve scanned an item, you can choose from five color modes to make it look perfect. There are also tools to crop and optimize scanned documents, all of which are automatically captured in 200+ dpi.   

You’re able to save documents as PDF or JPG files, and you can upload these to a range of major cloud services. The software supports iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon Drive, Slack, Todolist, OneDrive, OneNote and Box.

If you plan on using Scanbot for business purposes, you can easily fax documents directly from your mobile device in 50 supported countries. As is the case with most of these apps, Scanbot is free to download on Android and iOS, with the option of in-app purchases. 

As the name suggests, CamScanner is an app that turns the camera of your mobile device into a document scanner. With it, you’re able to scan a range of documents, from invoices to receipts. The software turns scanned documents into PDF files, which are automatically uploaded to cloud services such as Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and OneDrive.

Targeted specifically at business users, the app lets you invite colleagues to view and comment on scans. However, they must have a user account to do so. There’s also an advanced editing feature, which lets you add annotations and watermarks to documents, making them look more professional. For improved security, you can add passcodes to documents.   

The app is free to download on Android and iOS but you can upgrade to a premium plan to get 10GB of storage, send document links with password protection, batch download documents, and more besides. 

For the Premium Account you have the option to pay either $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. For the business version, which provides better options for team collaboration, it costs $6.99 per user per month, or $69.99 a year.

More document scanning apps

In addition to the document scanning apps listed above, there are plenty of others to consider. Here we'll feature some of the best of the rest available for Android phones:

Clear Scan is a free PDF scanning app, which allows you to quickly scan any text or image into a PDF file. The app includes an edge detection feature to prevent your images looking skewed, and scanned files can be easily saved to cloud storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. While the app is free it does contain advertising, though this is generally unobstrusive.

TapScanner is another free PDF scanner that easily handles images and documents, with an autodetect feature to ensure that any images is properly aligned. In addition to saving as PDF or PNG files, TapScanner also contains an OCR function to covert images to text, and supports over 100 languages. Although the free version contains ads, you can remove these for $4.99 a month, or $19.99 a year.

Microsoft Office Lens is specifically targeted at taking images of whitebaords, notes, and documents, which can then be saved to PDF, Word, or Powerpoint files. These can then be saved to the cloud via OneNote or OneDrive. Office Lens is free to use and comes with no ads, though more properly integrates with the paid-for Office 365 office suite.

Tiny Scanner turns your Android phone into a portable document scanner, allowing you to scan documents, receipts, reports, or anything else, and save the files as either a PDF or image file. Files can then be saved in DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and even Evernote, and the scanned files can be directly sent to your PC via wifi. The app is free, and is supported by ads.

Fast Scan is yet another app that turns your smartphone into a document scanner, and allows files to be saved to PDF and stored in the cloud. It also includes an OCR feature as well as PDF editing. While the app is free to use, it is supported by ads, though you can purchase an upgrade to remove these.

1. If you have backed up documents in the old phone, you can find the docs in /intsig/camscanner/databases_backup. If you’ve ever set to save the docs to external SD card, please check the docs in SD card/Android/data/com.intsig.camscanner/files/Intsig/CamScanner/databases_backup.

After backing up, please copy the whole CamScanner folder from the old phone to your new phone’s internal SD card. After copying, open CamScanner app, go to settings and tap “Security and Backup”. Choose “Restore” then you can restore all the documents.

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Getting IT Done

For all the talk about a “post-PC” world, most people use smartphones and tablets as additions to their existing technological arsenal, rather than a replacement for a standard laptop or desktop. What many users fail to realize is that there are a number of ways to combine the capabilities of your PC and mobile device that can make your tablet or smartphone an even more powerful tool. We've previously examined how to use your mobile devices to make your PC more useful: we talked about how to turn a tablet into a second monitor, how to make your phone a file server, how to use your phone as a keyboard and mouse, and how to easily stream your video library to your phone or tablet. This week, we'll talk about how to use your smartphone as a document scanner.

While reading the comments to our review of Doxie's portable document scanner a few weeks back, I noticed that a few of you were eschewing scanners entirely in favor of these phone apps, so I decided to dig a little deeper. It turns out that there's no shortage of scanner software for both iOS and Android, and most of the apps are pretty similar in operation: take a picture of a document with the phone's camera, apply post-processing filters as desired, and then save the scans to your phone. The differences lie in price, and in what the apps can do with your "scans" after you've made them.

Cheap and simple: JotNot Scanner Pro

If you're using iOS and want something simple and inexpensive, MobiTech 3000's free JotNot Scanner will get the job done. You use the app by either snapping a photo of your document or importing it from your photo library, at which point it will attempt to detect the edges of your document. The app does a pretty good job of edge detection by itself, but you can move the edges of the document around before post-processing to make sure your scan just shows the document and not part of your desk or table underneath. For the best results, you'll want to get in as close to the document as you can, make sure that it's lying flat, and ensure that you're not taking the photo from an excessive angle—this can cause odd bending and warping of the final scan—it's especially problematic if you're trying to capture a sheet of paper that has begun to curl at the edges.

By default, the app then ramps up the contrast to eliminate noise and more accurately simulate an actual scanned document. This does have the unfortunate side effect of eliminating detail, however—when you're shooting a black-and-white document in a well-lit room, most details come through well enough to be perfectly readable, but fine detail and color accuracy can be obliterated by this process, especially in low light. You can choose between a few scan enhancement presets (or define your own custom enhancement presets) in the app's settings to try to get more satisfactory results if you're having problems—the source photo of the scan is saved so that you can come back to it and try again as often as you need to.

Once you've scanned a document, you're free to add more pages to create a multi-page scan. To move your scans to your computer, the free version is capable of saving scans to your camera roll, which you can then move to your computer via Photo Stream or a USB cable. There's also a Pro version available for $1.99 that adds support for uploading to Evernote, Box.net, Dropbox, Google Docs, and WebDAV shares; e-mailing scans; and converting scans into JPG, PNG, and PDF; but you can save money by downloading the application and activating that functionality via a $0.99 in-app purchase.

Other JotNot features of note include the ability to send faxes via an in-app purchase; the feature costs $0.99 for faxes up to five pages long. Using your phone's IP address, you can also use the app's WiFi sharing feature to connect to the device with your PC or Mac to download individual scans or a complete .zip archive of every scanned document stored on the device.

More costly, more capable: CamScanner+

CamScanner+ costs $4.99 and comes in both iOS and Android versions. Like JotNot, it can e-mail scans in PDF or JPG formats (but not PNG), save scans to your phone's photo library, and integrate with cloud services like Google Docs, Box.net, Dropbox, and Evernote. However, the higher price gets you some additional features.

The app is better at storing and organizing scans, and allowing you to find them later: scans can be categorized under one of several predefined or custom-made tags, making it easier to keep your business cards separate from your receipts, and you can make notes on each scan that you can then search for later. CamScanner also includes optical character recognition (OCR), which can make the text of scanned documents searchable, useful if you're digging through your scans looking for one particular document.

The process of actually taking and/or importing pictures is very similar to JotNot, as you can see above, but CamScanner uses its own picture-taking UI instead of the native UI, giving it a couple of extra options. For one, the app can easily switch between single-page and multipage documents as you're taking the pictures with just a flip of a (virtual) switch, rather than having to take and process one picture at a time as you do in JotNot. This greatly expedites the process of creating a multipage document, though a document scanner with a sheet feeder will obviously be faster still.

To my eye, CamScanner also labels its scan enhancement options more clearly—rather than burying them in a Presets menu, the different options are presented to you right after your phone finishes enhancing the scan, allowing you to make changes on the fly. Like JotNot, CamScanner keeps a copy of the original photo so you can go back and retouch your scans as needed.

Since scanned documents also contain some sensitive information, CamScanner gives you the option to set an app-specific passcode that is independent of your device's passcode—that way, even if you share the phone or tablet with family members or coworkers, they can't immediately access all of your scans.

A free version of CamScanner is also available for iOS and Android; while it can upload to cloud services and do much of what the paid version can do, it uses advertisements and puts a watermark on everything it scans—the latter is not especially desirable for professional usage. It also lacks the OCR capabilities of the paid version.

Neither JotNot Scanner nor CamScanner are feasible for high-volume use, for cases where detail is of the essence, or for excessively damaged documents that won't lie flat on their own. If all you need to do is scan a few business cards or receipts every now and again, though, scanner apps can do the job of a portable document scanner for a fraction of the price.