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.

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)

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