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 pages whose text you can select, copy and search - and one button puts them all in a single file, in the order you dropped them.
Nothing is uploaded. Text recognition runs on your own computer, through the recognition built into the operating system, 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 any PDF reader highlights the phrase and copying it gives you the words back.
- Nothing on the page is redrawn - the photo is the page. Signatures, stamps, logos and handwriting stay exactly as they were shot, including anything the text recognition could not read.
- Turns the page the right way up - a page photographed sideways or upside down is 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 system reads - the list comes from the operating system's own text recognition, so every language installed there is offered, or leave it on "Automatic".
- 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.
- Entirely offline - no upload, no queue on somebody else's server. Works on a plane.
How it works
Drop photos anywhere on the window, or send them to the app with "Open With". Each one is turned upright, its text is recognized, and a PDF is written next to the original with a -scan suffix. The photo becomes the page and the words sit invisibly on top of it. 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, saved wherever you choose. 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 auto-rotation for the photos that do not need it.
Perfect for
- Expense claims - a pile of crumpled receipts photographed on a desk, filed as one searchable PDF.
- Signed paperwork - the signature and the stamp stay on the page exactly as signed, with the typed text around them searchable.
- Lecture and meeting notes - photos of handwriting and whiteboards bound 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.
