Capture
Optical scanners and OCR (optical character recognition) have come a long way. You can get just as good quality results from a smartphone app as from most flatbed scanners.
The following apps all scan photos, documents and whiteboards, automatically straighten and crop the image and optionally read the text. They can all create multi-page PDFs. This is incredibly helpful if you are dealing with physical manuscripts or other written material.
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Genius Scan (Android and iOS): Scans multi-page documents as PDFs. High resolution, low file size, save and email direclty from the app. An excellent free option for all devices.
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Adobe Scan (Android and iOS): Scans documents and saves them as PDFs to Adobe Document Cloud. Requires a Creative Cloud subscription to save PDFs.
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Microsoft Lens (Android and iOS): Microsoft’s scanner tool. Also scans documents and saves as images or PDF. Can annotate scans with text. Requires Microsoft 365 subscription to save to OneDrive.
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SwiftScan (Android and iOS): Connects with several cloud services. Requires monthly subscription.
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Apple Notes: The Notes app on iPhone scans multi-page documents as PDFs. An excellent free option if you have an iPhone.
Our recommendation: Genius Scan
Adobe Scan is more polished and has more features, great if you have a Creative Cloud subscription. Microsoft Lens has annotation features, great is you have OneDrive connected to your phone/device. Genius Scan is a reliable intuive scanning app (even my mum uses it) that doesn’t require any cloud storage subscription.