PDF guides
How to Scan a Document to PDF from Your Phone
Scan to PDF turns a stack of paper pages, photographed with your phone, into one clean PDF — captured, reordered, and rotated entirely in your browser.
Ready to try the tool this guide describes?
Before you start
You can add up to 30 photos per PDF, each up to 25 MB, with a 75 MB combined total. JPG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC photos are all supported, including HEIC photos picked from an iPhone library.
Step-by-step
- Tap "Take a photo" to open your device’s camera, or choose existing photos from your library.
- Repeat for every page of the document — pages appear in the order you add them.
- Drag a page to reorder it, or use Move up / Move down.
- Rotate any page that came out sideways using Rotate left or Rotate right.
- Choose a page size, orientation, margin, and fit.
- Select "Build PDF & download."
Fixing a page that came out wrong
If a page is rotated the wrong way, use its Rotate left/right controls rather than retaking the photo — see the companion guide on fixing sideways pages for why phone photos so often need this.
If a page is unusable, remove it and add a fresh photo; the rest of the page order is preserved.
Choosing page size and fit
Auto page size fits each page snugly around its photo. Letter and A4 give every page a fixed, consistent size instead — useful when the PDF will be printed. Contain keeps the whole photo visible inside the page; fill crops the photo to cover the page edge to edge.
How to Scan a Document from Your Phone FAQ
- Do I need a scanner to use this?
- No — just your phone or tablet camera, or existing photos already on your device.
- Are my photos uploaded?
- No. Building the PDF runs locally in your browser.
- Can I mix camera captures and photos from my library?
- Yes. Add pages using either "Take a photo" or the regular photo picker, in any order.
- What if I need more than 30 pages?
- Build the document in two batches and combine the resulting PDFs afterward using Merge PDF.
- Does the tool automatically straighten a crooked photo?
- No — it corrects 90-degree rotation with the Rotate controls, but does not auto-straighten a slightly tilted photo.
Related guides
- Fixing Sideways Scanned PagesWhy phone photos of documents so often come out sideways or upside-down, and how Scan to PDF's per-page rotate controls fix it before you build the final PDF.
- Scan to PDF vs. Images to PDFLooty Tools has two ways to turn photos into a PDF. Here's exactly how Scan to PDF's phone-camera capture and per-page rotation differ from the general-purpose Images to PDF converter, and when to use each.
