Turn paper documents into digital form

Scan high-quality documents using your iOS device’s camera

scanbot uses your iOS device’s camera to snap documents, barcodes, QR codes and even photos, and then saves them as PDFs or JPEGs ready to share on a wide range of cloud-based services, on a WebDAV or FTP server, or by email.

While the free version of Scanbot provides access to almost all of its features, we recommend the Pro ($7.99) or VIP ($9.99) version. You’ll then be able to create folders, annotate and sign documents, and use optical character recognition (OCR) to search or copy a document’s text. You’ll soon find all kinds of uses for Scanbot, and it’s by far the easiest way to digitize your documents.

On the opposite page we’ll explore the main ways you can use the app, but before you start there are a couple of things you should know. The first is to make sure your document is well lit, and that it’s lying on a flat surface or at least placed parallel to your iOS device’s camera. Next, make sure you place your document on a background of suitably high contrast. Scanbot will attempt to frame the document’s edges and straighten things out, but it can’t perform miracles. It’ll warn you if the document is too dark or too light, or if it’s having problems detecting the document’s edges, giving you the opportunity to try again. However, you can also capture a document manually, and then use Scanbot’s built-in editing tools to square up the document’s edges, correct its colors, and so on.

Scanbot also lets you choose how a document is captured. You can either get the app to capture it automatically as soon as it recognizes there’s a page in front of the camera, or you can control it manually. Either way, Scanbot’s features are so useful that you’ll soon wonder how you ever managed without it.