How to Scan Documents With Your Phone and Email Them as a PDF
The bank wants a signed form back today, the office scanner is miles away, and you have your phone. A phone camera is a perfectly good scanner if you take the pictures carefully and turn them into one PDF, rather than emailing six separate photos the reader has to open one at a time.
Photograph the pages properly
Lay each page flat on a dark, plain surface so the paper's edges stand out. Use daylight or a bright room and switch the flash off; flash leaves a white glare on glossy paper. Hold the phone directly above the page, not at an angle, and fill the screen with the page. Take one photo per page, in order, and check each one is sharp before moving on.
Turn the photos into one PDF
Open Scan to PDF in your phone's browser and add the photos from your gallery, in page order. You can also pick them from Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, up to 260 MB each. With several photos, choose One PDF to get a single document with every page in the order you added them; PDF each gives a separate file per photo. Download the PDF, which on an iPhone lands in Downloads in the Files app.
Make it small enough to email
Phone photos are large, so a five-page scan can easily pass the attachment limit of many email services, often around 20 to 25 MB. Use Continue with this file to send the PDF to Compress PDF; the Recommended level keeps text sharp on screen and cuts the size considerably. Smaller files also arrive faster and fit into upload forms with tight limits.
Send it
From the Files app on iPhone or the Downloads folder on Android, tap Share and choose your email app; the PDF is attached to a new message. Give the file a clear name first, such as Account-form-signed.pdf, so the recipient knows what it is without opening it. From the result screen you can also send it straight to WhatsApp.
Useful extras
If a page needs your signature and you no longer have the paper, add it with Sign PDF before sending. If the reader needs to search or copy text from the scan, run OCR PDF on it. And if dark edges of the table show around the pages, Crop PDF trims them off every page at once.