App of the week – Readdle’s Scanner Pro. Turn your phone into a portable scanner!

Scanner Pro, Readdle, iOS

This is a very handy app for iOS devices, that uses the camera on your smartphone to convert paper documents to PDFs, and then uploads them to Dropbox. It has all sorts of uses but I use it for scanning receipts, business cards, important documents and even the childrens’ artwork!

To get started, you hover the phone over what you want scanned. This can be small or large – I’ve done A3 documents before. You can choose to automatically scan once the app has found the document edges but I’ve chosen manual operation in this screenshot (1). Then choose the colour mode (2). The app does a good job of identifying the edges of the scan, you just hold the camera still and press the shutter button (3):

You get the option to tweak the edges of the scan – but I find this rarely necessary as long as there’s decent light and some contrast in the background. You can also add further pages if you like, resulting in a multi-page PDF.

Before I save the scan I append a name to the end of the pre-filled date to help find the scan later (1), then (2).

I have the app configured to automatically upload the saved PDF to my Dropbox account. You can see the upload icon in the screenshot below:

To configure the Dropbox account, click the cog in the top left corner of the app and choose add service (1):

You can also upload to other services like Google Drive too:

Within a minute or so the scan appears on your desktop computer:

Even if I have my scanner next to me, I still use this app since it’s far quicker and much more convenient!