Scanning a doc or pic? Choose from these four scanning apps
Scanning a document or a hazy old photo no longer requires access to a full-fledged scanner or a multi function printer. Your smartphone can scan anything from a business card to a full page document in as much time. The quality of the scans may vary from one smartphone to another as a lot depends on the quality of the smartphone’s camera as well. Here are some scanning apps for Android and iOS which can not only scan docs but also offer features such as OCR (optical character recognition) and image enhancement.
Developed by a psychology student Deshanie Govender at the University of South California, ScanRite provides a userfriendly and affordable scanning option to users through their smartphones. It can scan anything from an A4 size sheet to a business card. It also offers options to enhance the scan quality by adjusting colour contrast, brightness or cropping selective portion of the scan. The app also provides OCR support with a one-time payment fee of $1.99. OCR can convert a scanned PDF into a Word document allowing users to save scanned files as editable text files.
Microsoft’s document scanning app Office Lens is all about flexibility. So, while scanning a document you don’t have to worry about the frame or angle from which the scan is being captured. This feature can be useful while scanning a thick book or a poster pasted higher on the wall. It cannot not only straighten these images, but can also get rid of glares or shadows. Scans can be saved directly to the OneDrive cloud storage or as pdf, power point, Word file and as JPEG image in a gallery. It supports OCR, which means you can edit saved docs. It is one of the few scanning apps which offer so many features without charging a dime for any of them or enforcing its watermark on scans.
More popular as a cloud storage service, Google Drive app on Android has some cool hidden features. One of them is the built-in scanner which can scan any docs or photos in colour, monochrome and special effects like a drawing. You can rotate pages, select image quality and scan anything between a Letter sized documents to a B5 length sheet. It can also club two separate scans together when you are scanning multiple pages at once. The biggest advantage is that your scans are directly saved on your Drive storage.
Google PhotoScan is especially designed to scan photos and save them straight to the Google Photos. It can also scan documents but saves everything in the JPEG file format only. To create more robust scans with zero glare, shadows and reflections, the app takes multiple shots from different angles. In low light the flash is switched on by itself. The app is interlinked to Google Photos, so you can edit any scanned file later on.
Another cloud storage service, Dropbox now offers the option to scan documents, photo, and whiteboards from its mobile app. User can crop, adjust colour contrast and combine multiple scans together to create a one long pdf file. User can also save the scanned files on Dropbox cloud storage. The app also supports OCR, but it is not available to individual users. It is limited to enterprise users who have access to Dropbox Business account.