Adobe Scan (for iPhone) - Review 2022

Sometimes you accept a slice of paper that y'all need to become into digital form. Perhaps you don't have a scanner handy. Never fear! That's where Adobe Scan, a newly released mobile scanning app, comes in. The app can not only produce a PDF using your smartphone photographic camera, only it can also apply optical-character recognition (OCR) to the scanned prototype so that you can edit its text. I institute Adobe Scan to exist generally impressive, though there are alternatives that lucifer or surpass it in some ways.

Getting Started

Adobe Scan is a free iPad and iPhone app, though an in-app buy raises its ugly head later on, equally I'll explain. At that place's also an Android equivalent. On iOS it's a reasonably small, 39MB download that runs on iOS ten.0 or later, so the oldest phone it works on is the less-than-four-year-sometime iPhone 5s. I tested the app on my iPhone 6s.

Adobe Scan Start

When you kickoff open Adobe Scan, a simple three-page welcome slideshow appears. After this, you lot take to sign in to an Adobe account, otherwise you tin can't practice anything with the app. I always prefer apps that can exercise at least something without requiring an business relationship setup and sign-in; failing that, a simple sign upwardly with Facebook procedure is a 2nd best. At least the type of Adobe account required here is free, even so. Next, every bit only makes sense for a scanning app, you have to give it privacy permission to utilise your iPhone camera.

Using the Adobe Browse App

The first thing Adobe Browse does is to bear witness you lot a camera view, with a message suggesting you point the camera at a document. When you do this, the app reads "Looking for a document." On my first attempt, the app couldn't make out the text on a small magazine, because there were too many columns with very small text. My second try was with white text on a black background, which besides confused the app. Those two tricky situations aside, the app was very skilful at recognizing text in my testing, however. When printed text is detected, blue-tinted rectangles appear, to indicate the detection. When the app recognizes text for certain, it snaps the shot automatically—neat!

The app saves the image, which and then shows upwardly as a thumbnail in the lower-correct corner of the screen with a counter number. Tap on this, and you can salvage it as a PDF to Adobe Document Cloud online storage associated with your account. Dorsum up for a moment though, considering the app does another cool affair: Information technology straightens out the certificate you shot, and car-crops information technology to the area containing text. You can change either of these edits to taste when viewing the capture, though.

Microsoft Office Lens, another document-scanning app that also cleans up photos, does similar straightening, and it even clears up dingy backgrounds. Role Lens, as you lot might wait, is more about getting the text into Office apps like Word, OneNote, and PowerPoint, though information technology also tin can create PDFs from your scans. As with Adobe Scan, the documents are editable, cheers to OCR. Evernote Scannable is a competing app that feels near identical to Adobe Scan, merely its main goal is saving your scans to Evernote. Furthermore, it doesn't practice total document OCR to let you edit text, as Adobe Scan and Office Lens do.

Adobe Scan Complete and Save

Adobe Scan lets you snap multiple printed documents in multiple modes, including Original Photo, Car Color, Grayscale, or Whiteboard. After you accept a few scans, you can reorder them, rename them, crop them, and rotate them.

You tin create a PDF from whatsoever browse the app performs. When you do this (by hit Save PDF), y'all see a spinner and the message "Recognizing Text." To exercise annihilation besides viewing your PDF and performing the bones fixes mentioned above, you need to open up it in another app, which in near cases means Adobe Reader. The scan view includes a share icon and a link to open it in Reader. From that app, you can search on text and mark up the scan with highlighter and text annotations. You tin fifty-fifty select text for copying, formatting, highlighting, and dictionary lookup.

Convert your browse (via the cloud) to a Medico file is possible—but doing this requires a paid Adobe Document Deject subscription. For free DOC creation, you lot're better off with Office Lens. I found getting to editable Word docs simpler and faster in Office Lens, but the Adobe consequence was all the same splendid. It includes both the plain editable certificate text along with an image of the scan that's also editable, with the original fonts preserved. One matter the app doesn't let you do is to fax your scanned document; for that adequacy, check out our roundup of the best online fax services.

The Best Scanning App?

Adobe Scan for iPhone is definitely an impressive app, with automated text recognition and cleanup. It also lets you marking up—equally well as copy text from—the created PDFs. But I did find getting documents into editable text was easier and took fewer steps with Microsoft Office Lens, and doing then with Adobe Scan requires a paid Adobe Certificate Cloud subscription. If you already have a Creative Cloud subscription, that's not a problem. If you don't need to edit text, PCMag Editors' Option Evernote Scannable is a good option that offers some appealing extras. Fellow Editors' Choices Abbyy FineScanner and Dropbox Business add features of interest to corporate users. Simply for easier sharing and editing of scanned documents, look to Office Lens.