If you need to scan a document but don’t have access to a bulky scanner, then your iPhone camera can do the hard work for you. With the iScanner app for the iPhone and iPad you can snap a photo of a document and it’ll detect where it is, optimizing its shape and accommodating for different borders and angles.
Once you’ve scanned a document you can then save it or sign it, add text, insert photos or images, mark it up, add a watermark and much more. This is an ideal tool for students who might want to take photos of notes or any other profession that requires you to move between using offline documents and carrying out digital tasks.
How does iScanner work?
To get started you use the camera inside the iScanner app to take a photo of any document. You can select what sort of document it is to get the best results, like Passport, ID Card, Math or just Document for everything else. Once you’ve done your “scanning” you can save the results in the cloud and access your document from within the app or export it as a PDF, JPG, DOС, XLS, PPT, or TXT file.
The developers say there’s “advanced AI” in the app, which helps identify text in 20 languages, as well as straighten and edit your documents. This is ideal if you’re in a rush and scan something at a slight angle. Or if the lighting is a little low and you need to bump up the brightness.
There’s also an “Ask AI” feature, which goes one step further than scanning. You can ask it to carry out other simple tasks, like “Summarize” or “Simplify”. During my testing I found this worked well sometimes, but not all of the time. However, it is a handy tool to differentiate iScanner from similar document scanning apps.
There are several different ways to use iScanner. You can scan for free, but only get a limited amount of storage. For 100GB worth of scanning and document storage you can pay £20.99/$20.99 for a year, which works at only £0.40/$0.40 a week. There is an option for a 3-day free trial of the 100GB version which then requires you to pay $4.99/£4.99 a week. That’s a big price difference, so if you decide you want more storage and can afford to pay for the whole year, make that choice it straight away.