Genius Scan 6.0
Fast scans and excellent OCR
Free (IAPs) From The Grizzly Labs, thegrizzlylabs.com
Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS/iPadOS 13.0 or later
One of our favorite iOS features is the ability to use your device’s camera as a scanner for things like business cards, receipts, and so on. Genius Scan takes that idea and doesn’t so much run with it as strap it to a rocket. It’s a fully featured scanning app that uses your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch’s quality camera and processing power to deliver scanning and text recognition.
Genius Scan 6.0 is available for free and offers smart scanning with document detection and background removal, distortion correction, and a range of filters and tools to get the best possible quality from your scanned document. You can export to PDF and create multi–page PDFs either by scanning multiple pages or by combining scans and existing photos and PDFs, and you can tag and add metadata to your documents. We particularly like the Batch Scanning feature that makes light work of grabbing documents.
Where things get even more interesting is when you go for the $7.99 paid–for version, Genius Scan+. This introduces multiple cloud service support and a superb OCR engine that extracts text from documents and enables your PDFs to be searchable.
It can also scan business cards and create contact information from them.
The paid–for version also enables you to protect your scans with Face ID.
The OCR works very well and very quickly — single–page recognition was instant on our iPhone 12 — even when the font sizes are fairly small, although like most OCR apps it expects normally formatted documents. Complex layouts can be confusing and documents with very thin fonts or very light text require good lighting for recognition. Accuracy isn’t quite 100% but it’s close enough to save you a great deal of typing, and if you export your scans as text and then delete the originals you can store a lot of documents in very little space. Your export options are PDF, JPG and text, and you can share via email, cloud storage, Files, and even FTP.
Perhaps the best way to describe Genius Scan+ is this — within arm’s reach of our MacBook there’s a flatbed scanner that’s permanently connected to our Mac. Since we started using Genius Scan, we haven’t missed it at all.
THE BOTTOM LINE. Fast, flexible, and useful scanning with good OCR. CARRIE MARSHALL