Behold! Mobile Scanning Apps

Say goodbye to needing a scanner and computer to make digital copies!

Behold the mobile scanning app. If you have a smart phone or tablet, mobile scanning apps can help you easily turn your device into a powerful tool for transforming photos, book pages, and documents into a digital format, such as a PDF.

The WHG Archives Team—who lean on mobile scanning apps when providing researchers with digital copies of archival material—took a look at the following apps and evaluated them based on usability and cost.

ADOBE SCAN

Cost: Free

Available for: iPhone, iPad and Android devices

Pros:

• Powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

• Edge detection is automatic

• Pages can be reordered and deleted

• Option to rotate and crop scanned pages

• Cleanup tool for erasing unwanted marks

• Easily switch to save scans in the following styles: original color photograph, auto color, grayscale, and black-and-white

• Share documents via email, text, or the app of your choice

Cons:

• Only scans to PDF initially (although you can save pages as JPEGs after your PDF has been created)

EVERNOTE SCANNABLE

Cost: Free

Available for: iPhone, iPad

Pros:

• Set capture to manual or automatic

• Flash can be set to on, off, or automatic

• Automatic edge detection

• Easily switch to save scans with original photograph quality or photocopy quality for clear text and smaller file size

• Pages can easily be rotated, cropped, and re-ordered

• Distortion correction is available through the cropping tool

• Scan as JPEG or PDF

• Immediately email or share documents, or save them to an Evernote account

Cons:

• No contrast adjustment
• PDFs are somewhat large
• No automatic OCR (Optical Character Recognition) (only scanned documents saved to an Evernote account will get an OCR treatment)

TINY SCANNER PRO

Cost: $4.99

Available for: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android devices

Pros:

• Set capture to manual or automatic

• Edge detection can be manual or automatic

• Easily switch to save scans in a variety of styles: original photograph, greyscale, color, or black-and-white 

• Scanned pages can be rotated and cropped

• Option to save as JPEG or PDF

• Immediately email or share documents via Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, and Evernote

Cons:

• Cost
• No contrast adjustment

SCANNER APP

Cost: $9.99/mo after three-day trial

Available for: iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch

Pros:

• Automatic edge detection

• Can crop, resize, adjust color and brightness

• Distortion correction provided

• Scan type can be set before scanning (QR code, documents, passport, math equations, etc.)

• Scan to PDF, JPEG or TXT format

• Scanned image can be adjusted for different sizes of paper output

Cons:

• Cost
• Unclear if you can switch back and forth between photo-quality and photocopy-quality once something is scanned

These are but a few of the mobile scanning app options on the market today. As technology advances in software and mobile devices, it seems plausible that the office flatbed scanner may soon be a relic of the past.