Scan to PDF

Build a professional-looking PDF from your phone's camera roll

A dedicated scanner is still the gold standard for paper-to-PDF workflows, but most of the time you don't have one nearby. What you do have is a phone camera that's taken three, five, or twenty photos of a receipt, a letter, a signed form, or a meeting handout. The OkFarsi Scan to PDF tool turns those phone photos into a document that looks like it came from a real scanner: edges auto-detected, pages deskewed, backgrounds cleaned up, and everything packaged into one ordered PDF.

The processing pipeline has three distinct steps. Edge detection looks for the boundary of the page in each photo and crops away the surrounding desk, hand, or clipboard — so a photo taken with the page slightly off-center still produces a clean rectangular page. Deskew rotates each cropped page so the text lines are horizontal, correcting the slight tilt that's unavoidable with handheld photos. Finally, a contrast and background pass brightens the page and removes shadows, giving a result that reads like black text on white paper rather than a dim photo.

After the image pipeline, the tool assembles the processed pages into a single PDF in whatever order you upload them, with the page size and orientation you pick. Optional OCR at the end of the pipeline adds a searchable text layer — a compelling combination if the end goal is a searchable archive rather than just a visual record. The whole sequence can happen in a single upload, rather than forcing you to bounce between separate crop, deskew, and OCR tools.

How to build a PDF from phone photos

1. Shoot better source photos

   Before you reach for the tool, give yourself five seconds of setup. Place the document on a contrasting surface (a dark table under a white page works well), turn on the lights, hold the phone parallel to the page, and tap to focus on the text. Two minutes of better shots saves an hour of post-processing.

2. Upload the images in page order

   Drop the photos into the upload area. File order becomes page order in the PDF, so rename or re-upload if the sequence is wrong — drag-to-reorder inside the workspace also works.

3. Let auto edge detection and deskew run

   The tool crops to the detected page boundary and rotates each page so the text is horizontal. Preview the thumbnails before continuing — if a crop looks wrong, you can disable auto-crop on that page or adjust manually.

4. Pick page size, orientation, and optional OCR

   Choose A4, Letter, or Fit-to-image. Turn on OCR if you want a searchable result. Turn on background cleanup for photos taken in uneven lighting.

5. Run the job and download the PDF

   The pipeline crops, deskews, enhances, assembles, and optionally OCRs in one pass. The result is a single PDF you can email or archive — open it to confirm the pages look like scans, not phone photos.

Common use cases

• Receipts for expense reports

  Snap every receipt at the end of a trip, upload the batch, and get one tidy PDF to attach to the expense system.

• Paper contracts captured on the go

  Photograph a signed contract during a meeting and walk out with a clean, deskewed PDF instead of a stack of skewed photos.

• Handouts and whiteboard captures

  Turn workshop handouts or a series of whiteboard photos into a single searchable PDF you can share with the team.

• Personal archiving

  Digitize old letters, certificates, or family documents from photos, with OCR added so the archive becomes searchable.

Privacy & security

The whole pipeline runs on isolated workers inside our infrastructure — no third-party image-recognition service touches your photos. Uploaded images and the resulting PDF are removed from our servers shortly after your download completes. If OCR is enabled, recognized text is written into the PDF and is not retained separately. For personal or sensitive captures (receipts with card numbers, signed contracts, ID cards), download promptly and clear the photos from any local temp folders.

Frequently asked questions