ScanToPDF turns photos of paper into searchable PDFs, then binds them into one document. Drop in snapshots of a contract, a stack of receipts or twenty pages of notes and you get back flat, evenly lit pages whose text you can select, copy and search - and one click puts them all in a single file, in the order you dropped them.
Nothing is uploaded. The page detection, the perspective correction and the text recognition all run through Apple's own Vision framework on your Mac, so a payslip or a passport photo never leaves the machine. Your originals are never touched: every page is written as a new file beside the photo it came from.
Highlights
- Bind a batch into one PDF - twenty pages of one contract become a single document, in the order you dropped them, with every page's text layer intact. The individual pages stay on disk, so it is never a decision you are stuck with.
- PDFs you can actually search - recognized text is laid invisibly over its own pixels, word by word, so selecting a phrase in Preview highlights the phrase and copying it gives you the words back.
- Finds the page and flattens it - the document is detected as a four-cornered shape wherever it sits in the frame, and the perspective is unwarped. A page shot from an angle comes out square, not merely rotated.
- Turns the page the right way up - a page photographed sideways is flattened and then read four ways round; whichever orientation makes sense is the one that gets saved.
- Whole batches at once - drop twenty photos and they queue up, several at a time, each landing beside its own original as it finishes. Stop mid-run and the finished pages are kept.
- Reads the languages your Mac reads - the language list comes from the installed system, so anything macOS can recognize is offered, and "Automatic" handles a mixed folder on its own.
- Says when a page had no text - every row reports its word count, because a searchable PDF with an empty text layer is the one failure the file itself will not show you until you try to select something.
- Tells you when it could not find a page - a photo with no detectable document is still cleaned up and saved, and the row says "Full frame" so you know why that one is not cropped.
- Entirely offline - no account, no upload, no queue on somebody else's server. Works on a plane.
How it works
Drop photos anywhere on the window, or open them from Finder with "Open With". Each one is read, the page inside it is found and flattened, the lighting is evened out, the page is turned upright, the text is recognized, and a PDF is written next to the original with a -scan suffix. There is no confirm step: dropping is the instruction.
When the batch finishes, Combine into one PDF binds every finished page into a single document and shows it in Finder. It is offered rather than automatic, because twenty photos are just as often twenty separate receipts as they are twenty pages of one contract - and only you know which.
The Settings panel is optional and stays out of the way. It is where you name the suffix, set the text language, and switch off page-finding or auto-rotation for the photos that do not need them.
Perfect for
- Expense claims - a pile of crumpled receipts photographed on a desk, filed as one searchable PDF.
- Signed paperwork - send back something that looks scanned instead of a photo of your kitchen table.
- Lecture and meeting notes - handwriting and whiteboards flattened into one document you can flip through.
- Books and archives - photograph pages quickly, bind a chapter at a time, then let the text layer make years of them searchable.
- Anything private - contracts, medical letters, ID documents. Nothing about them is ever sent anywhere.
