• Best Document Scanner For Mac 2017

Last Updated: November 23, 2018 Whether you need to edit PDFs, images or scanned documents, extract text from them or just make them searchable, we’ve tested the most accurate OCR applications for Mac of 2018. Optical Character Recognition software can scan, extract text and convert documents such as PDFs, images, handwriting, magazines, textbooks and more to make them searchable or editable. Nowadays, powerful OCR apps like (which is currently ) are incredibly fast and accurate at scanning documents and preserving the formatting with accuracy rates of up to 99.8%.

Before diving in however, there’s a few things to be aware of to avoid disappointment when choosing the best scanner software for Macs. In our research, one thing that clearly stood out is that not all OCR programs on Mac perform the same. The accuracy and speed varies considerably and there are definitely some that do a better job than others. OCR is a highly specialized technology and we found that in most cases, you get what you pay for when it comes to software that scans text accurately and quickly. This is essential if you want to avoid having to do a lot of tedious manual correction of text in PDFs and other documents. The best OCR apps maintain the formatting of your original document after OCR scanning. Cheap OCR apps will only dump a text file onto your Mac (which of course is fine if that’s all you want).

However, most people want their document formatting preserving the same as the original document and budget OCR apps simply can’t do this. The top OCR tools can export to popular formats such as Microsoft Word, and ePub/eBook formats while not losing the original formatting of the PDF or document. Many of these apps are ideal if you want to go paperless although they’re most notable for their OCR capabilities. If you want something that also serves as a digital office check out our look at the. With this in mind, here’s our selection of the top performing OCR tools for Mac in order of ranking.

Has been around for almost 20 years now and is still the most highly rated and specialized OCR software for both Mac and PC. FineReader Pro has an accuracy rate of 99.8% and although this depends on the quality of the original document, the OCR text recognition performance is outstanding and easily the best on the market. It certainly does the fastest job of accurately recognizing text and preserving the original formatting of the scanned document including text size, font styles, images, tables and layouts. The FineReader Pro user interface is user friendly and straightforward. To get going, simply select the source of your scan and FineReader Pro will automatically detect which items can be scanned. You can select three different sources:. Mac Hardrive: A PDF, image, digital camera photo or other document already saved on your Mac.

Alternatively, you can simply Ctrl-Click on any file saved on your Mac and select Open With ABBYY Finereader Pro from the drop down menu. Flatbed Document Scanner: You can use a flatbed document scanner or multi-functional peripheral (MFP) such as an If you need to digitize a document first. Note that FineReader Pro for Mac only works with ICA compatible devices that are including Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners – it does not support TWAIN. You can also use network scanners if you’re in an office environment. You can find a list of official ICA compatible devices here. iPhone: A photo taken on an iPhone including documents, receipts and other notes that you may have taken on the move.

You can then then choose to convert the document to a searchable PDF PDF/A or editable format such as Microsoft Word (DOCX), Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet (XSLX) or HTML web page format. FineReader Pro for Mac also allows you convert to Apple Pages, Apple Numbers, OpenOffice Writer (ODT), RTF, Powerpoint (PPTX) and eBook EPUB/FB2 formats. Note that it can only convert password protected PDF documents if you know the password. EBook export is another useful touch as it allows you to read documents on iPad, Kindle and other devices which support the EPUB and FB2 formats. FineReader Pro automatically detects the scanning language but you can choose to scan in 192 different languages or a mixture of several including right to left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew. It doesn’t matter how long the document is as there’s no word limit on scans although the longer the document, the longer the scan will take. One page takes no more than a few seconds to scan so even documents that run into hundreds of pages don’t take more than a minute or so.

FineReader Pro uses it’s own proprietary ADRT (Adaptive Document Recognition Technology) scanning engine which can detect everything from tables and headers to footnotes and page numbers. This even includes native formatting attributes meaning it’s easy to update or modify tables afterwards just as if you were editing the original document. To speed things up however, you can highlight specific text or images on a page to scan if you don’t want it to scan the entire document.

This allows you to exclude specific page elements such as page numbers, headers, footers and pictures so that you just get the raw text. In general, Finereader Pro is very good at recognizing all types of fonts and accurately digitizing them. The accuracy of any OCR tool often depends on the quality of the original document but Finereader Pro is remarkably good at detecting text on older and less than perfect text quality in documents. For optimal results, ABBYY recommend using Grayscale/color mode with a resolution of 300 dpi and a font size 10 or larger and 400-600 dpi for smaller text.

On a clear PDF document you can expect almost 100% accuracy but it may be considerably less on other documents in bad condition or where the text is barely legible. Like most OCR apps however, FineReader Pro cannot recognize hand writing (this requires a different technology known as ).

This level of accuracy means less time having to manually edit or correct documents afterwards which is usually one of the biggest problems with OCR software. FineReader Pro for Mac is easily the best we’ve tried when it comes to preserving the format and layout of the original document.

When a scan is complete, Finereader Pro For Mac will highlight the text it has detected but displays the document in it’s original form. One of the most convenient features of ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac is the ability to scan photos that you’ve taken on your phone. This is ideal for archiving receipts and other documents when you get home or back to the office. The application analyzes and corrects the image before scanning to ensure that the scanned text is as accurate as possible.

Even on blurred or photos taken in low lighting such as the magazine page below, this works surprisingly well. If you need to OCR large batches of documents on a regular basis, you can also use to automatically run OCR scans using FineReader Pro. For instance, you can specify a folder to drag and drop documents into that will automatically OCR scan documents periodically.

Overall, in terms of OCR accuracy, speed, format preservation and conversion formats, ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac is the best we’ve tried. The real test of OCR software is how it performs on documents with low text quality or images in poor lighting and ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac seems able to accurately read whatever you throw at it. Although you can buy it through other vendors, we recommend buying direct from ABBYY as you will get updates to the software much quicker. You also get free phone support from ABBYY which is another bonus compared to most products which only offer support online or via email.

It usually retails for $119.99 but ABBYY is currently offering meaning it costs $48.00. Note that if you’re based in the UK or Europe, you need to go via the Students and teachers can also get a. For more you can also check out our.

Pros: The best for OCR accuracy and speed Converts to edit PDF, Word, Excel and more Maintains formatting of the original document Cons: No support for older TWAIN scanners At one time, was the only software for turning PDFs into something editable or searchable on Mac. Nowadays that’s completely changed but when it comes to doing pretty much anything with a PDF, Acrobat Pro is still incredibly powerful. It’s important to be aware that unlike ABBYY Finereader Pro for Mac, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is not primarily a dedicated OCR software. Rather it’s a PDF conversion software that has an in-built OCR engine that can take PDFs or other formats and turn tjem into something that can be searched by keywords or edited. If you just want to make the text editable or searchable in a PDF document, it’s very straightforward. Open a PDF file in Acrobat.

Click on the Edit PDF tool in the righthand pane. Acrobat automatically performs an optical character recognition scan (OCR) to your document and converts it to a fully editable copy of your PDF almost instantly. Click on the element you want to edit. You’ll see that any new text you add matches the look of the original font. Choose File Save As to save your new edited document.

If you want to perform an OCR scan of an image, scanned document or other file, the process is as follows:. Import the file into Acrobat either from your Mac or flatbed document scanner. All documents must have a resolution of at least 72dpi (Dots Per Inch) in order to scan in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC which is a fairly low requirement. However Adobe recommends scanning at 300 dpi (magazine print quality) for the most accurate results. You can also add multiple files if you want to OCR more than one document in one go. When the document opens in Acrobat, click on the Enhance Scans option on the right:. Highlight the document or area that you want to turn into an editable PDF:.

Use the Adjust enhancement level slider to tweak the contrast to make the text as clear as possible. If there are images in your document, the PDF Output Style options allow you to create 3 different types of PDF and relate to how Adobe Acrobat handles images. You can choose to create a Searchable Image, Exact Searchable Image and Editable Text & Images.

Searchable Image means images will be preserved but deskewed and an invisible text layer placed over it. Exact Searchable Image preserves the original image location and does not deskew it. Editable Text & Images synthesizes a new custom font that’s very similar to the original and preserves the page background in low-resolution. There’s also a Downsampling option which allows you to reduce the resolution and thus the file size of the document you want to OCR which is useful if it has a lot images.

Downsampling decreases the number of pixels in images after OCR scanning is complete. Finally, select Recognize Text from the toolbar to start the OCR scan. In a matter of seconds, you’ll have a searchable PDF that you can edit. The difference between Adobe Acrobat Pro and ABBYY Finereader Pro is that in Acrobat, you can instantly start editing the PDF including formatting, text and images. ABBYY’s product meanwhile requires you to export to another format first – such as Word, Excel or Pages – in order to edit.

Acrobat even allows you to add video and audio to PDF files and edit them in the. The OCR engine in previous versions of Acrobat was quite slow and inaccurate but Adobe has improved it significantly nowadays. One big improvement has been the introduction of “Preflight” which will go through a document you have scanned and check for character recognition errors. It does this by analyzing bitmaps of text and then inserts words and characters it thinks are correct. If Acrobat Pro is uncertain, it highlights the word as suspect so that you can easily see it and then check it manually yourself. To use this feature, simply search for “Preflight” in the Search Tools box on the top right-hand side of the interface. In the OCR Preflight search bar, type OCR and select Make OCR text visible.

Then just click the Analyze and fix button at the bottom. After Analysis, save the file and close the Preflight tool. Finally, open the Layer panel on the left to reveal the new layers.

If you click on the eye symbol to the left of Invisible text, you can toggle the layers on and off to compare and decide whether to keep the corrections Adobe Acrobat has suggested. Overall, when it comes to OCR converting and editing in PDF format, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is still the most powerful PDF editing software for Mac out there.

If you need to edit PDF documents after scanning, or sign and send them instantly, there is still no better application than Adobe’s Acrobat Pro. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of how Adobe Acrobat Pro DC compares with its closest rival ABBYY Finereader Pro For Mac. Finereader Pro vs Acrobat Pro DC ABBYY Finereader Pro Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Works on Mac Mac Desktop App Subscription Fee Turns Scanned Documents Into Searchable PDFs Accurate Scans Fast Scanning Allows PDF Editing Exports PDFs to MS Office & other formats Preserves Original Format Supports Batch OCR Technical Support Phone/Online Phone/Online eBook Export Mobile Image Integration Sign documents digitally Reduces File Size Educational Discount 30% off 60% off Creative Cloud Price $89.99 (currently 25% off) $14.99/month On it’s own,. Adobe Acrobat Standard DC is slightly cheaper at $12.99 per month but there is no Mac version of it – it’s Windows only. Adobe does not provide telephone support for Acrobat Pro but it does offer user forums and online. If you use other Adobe products however, it makes more economic sense to subscribe to the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite. A but includes access to all of Adobe’s industry leading apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro.

Students and teachers get. You can also try a to judge it for yourself. Pros: Excellent PDF editing and customization features Integrated with rest of Adobe Creative Cloud suite Cons: OCR scanning not as accurate as ABBYY Finereader Pro Not a dedicated OCR tool Subscription pricing model Readiris Pro is one of the most established OCR programs on the market. It was originally designed for Windows only but more recently has launched a version for macOS. Readiris is a powerful OCR app that can scan an impressive. Scanning with Readiris Pro is extremely accurate although less accurate than ABBYY on low resolution documents.

One of Readiris Pro’s strengths is that you can choose to export scans directly to a wide number of applications such as Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Pages, Numbers, Word, Excel, Evernote, Outlook and even iTunes. You can also covert OCR scans to audio book AIFF and eBook formats. The exported document also preserves formatting extremely well so that it looks exactly the same as the original. Readiris Pro is easy to use, allowing you to easily add or delete pages and drag and drop formatting any way you want.

Readiris also allows you to save documents to online services Box, SharePoint and OneDrive. Readiris Pro is a specialized OCR software that focuses on getting scans right.

It’s quite pricey however and you’ll need to Business version to avoid annoying limitations. Readiris Pro is. Readiris Business allows unlimited pages at once and supports automatic file conversion but it costs $199 compared to $99 for the Pro version. You can in action.

You can also sign-up for a. Pros: Very accurate scanning Exports to a wide range of applications Good format preservation Cons: Requires expensive Business edition to avoid OCR limitations Doesn’t edit PDFs Prizmo is a basic but very respectable OCR app for macOS. Prizmo does a partcularly good job on black and white documents and can handle images if they’re in high resolution. Prizmo supports an impressive 23 different languages thanks to an extensive neural network. Although Prizmo supports multiple languages however, you can only scan in one language mode which may be a problem for those scanning documents that aren’t just in English. It’s also not very good at handling articles in a low resolution which is often one of the things that separates more expensive OCR software from budget alternatives such as Prizmo. You’ll need to make sure that any documents you scan with Prizmo are above around 200 dpi to get acceptable results.

Prizmo supports Handoff which means that if you take a photo of a document with the for iPhone or iPad, you can access it in Prizmo straight away which is far more convenient than having to use a scanner. Prizmo also has an which can plug into macOS and allows you to OCR directly from within Finder any document or image you have open on your desktop. Prizmo is available in a Standard ($49.99) and Pro ($74.99) version. The Pro version offers more language support, OCR batch processing of multiple documents in one go, Automator support and custom export scripts. You can see more on the. There is a which has no time limit but when you export a file, there is a watermark installed and some characters are omitted in business cards. You can also see the sort of accuracy you can expect from Prizmo by checking the.

Pros: Includes voice support to read PDFs to you Syncs with an iOS app for photo scanning Cons: Accuracy can be hit and miss No Microsoft Office export support PDFpen is a powerful but user friendly PDF conversion and editing software that performs OCR scans of documents. PDFpen will mainly appeal to users that are looking for a cheaper version of Adobe Acrobat Pro as it’s main focus is PDF conversion and editing. The accuracy of PDFpen is nevertheless very good as it uses the which is widely acclaimed for its scanning accuracy although the OmniPage app itself only works on Windows. Note however that if you’re scanning confidential documents, the OmniPage OCR engine is cloud based and all documents scanned in PDFpen will be uploaded to the OmniPage server. When you open a PDF document in PDFpen, it automatically asks you whether you want to perform an OCR scan and in which language. Simply click on “OCR Page” or OCR Document to start the scan.

When the scan is complete, PDFpen overlays the text it has recognized which gives you the chance to edit any mistakes. When done, you can then edit, annotate, search, copy and paste text from the PDF document. Alternatively, you can export PDFs to Microsoft Word DOCX format for editing.

To help optimize documents for OCR scanning accuracy, PDFpen also has a useful “Deskew and Adjust Image” tool which straightens the image and adjusts image contrast and exposure. Other useful features in PDFpen including the ability to digitally sign PDFs with your trackpad or mouse, scan documents using your iPad or iPhone and re-order. PDFpen is generally fast and for those that regularly need to edit and convert PDF documents, it’s a good budget alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro. PDFpen costs $74.95 although there’s also PDFpen Pro for $124.95 which includes added features such as Microsoft Excel export support, ability to create and edit forms and turn websites into PDF. Is via email only. You can also download a.

There’s also an PDFpen iOS app and you can see. Pros: Allows you to edit PDFs directly Exports to Microsoft Word Cheaper than Adobe Acrobat Pro Cons: OCR engine uploads documents online Accuracy not great with images OCRKit is a no-nonsense, easy to use and very effective open source OCR tool that also popular on Windows. Note that although OCRKit is based on open source OCR technology, it’s a commercial product which costs $29.99.

OCRKIt is ideal if you just want to turn a PDF into a searchable PDF, RTF, HTML or TXT document. It’s easy to use, fast and supports long documents and batch processing. Apart from PDFs, you can also scan images in TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, PNM, BMP, PCX, GIF and OpenEXR formats.

OCRKit supports batch OCR scanning via macOS Automator and the accuracy is surprisingly good no matter what the condition or resolution of the original document. Using OCRKit couldn’t be easier.

Simply drag or drop any PDF, TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, PNM, BMP, PCX, GIF or OpenEXR document into the OCRKit Dock icon or interface and it will prepare it for scanning. Select a file name to save the OCR document to: OCRKit is surprisingly fast even with documents over 100 pages and within a few seconds, it will display the searchable document: There are a few other nice touches to OCRKit. The automatic rotation tool detects the orientation of each document automatically so you don’t need to manually organize a stack before scanning – very useful if you’re scanning multiple documents that aren’t organized very well. OCRKit will also automatically detect most major languages which is very useful if you’re scanning documents in more than one language. One other useful feature is that OCRKit is also integrated with Pages (Apple’s ) meaning you can drag a finished OCR document into Pages to edit it. However, it doesn’t work for converting a PDF to edit in Microsoft Word. If you’re looking for an easy, inexpensive but surprisingly powerful Mac OCR tool that preserves formatting in PDFs, OCRKit is an impressive tool.

OCRKit costs a very reasonable $29.99 which is excellent value considering the results you get. Pros: Decent OCR accuracy Support batches of documents Cons: Very basic interface Doesn’t export to MS Word DEVONthink Pro Office is aimed at those that want to go completely paperless in their home or office. The developer DEVONthink only makes software for Mac and iOS and so all of its products are tailored for Macs. DEVONthink Pro Office is ideal for small businesses that want to automatically OCR everything that comes in and goes out to reduce paperwork.

The OCR engine in DEVONthink Pro Office is actually the same as the one used in ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac. ABBYY license their OCR engine to integrate into other products and so in terms of accuracy, it’s very similar to ABBYY.

All documents you upload to DEVONthink Pro Office whether on your Mac or iOS device are automatically synced and OCR scanned by DEVONthink Pro Office. DEVONthink Pro Office intelligently files your documents based on how you previously filed similar documents. You can then search and retrieve these documents easily similar to the way you can search and retrieve emails in an email client.

You can also tag and group documents manually enabling you to keep everything far better organized digitally than having piles of paper documents. DEVONthink Pro Office is more of a document organizer than a dedicated OCR solution so there are fewer OCR features but lots of document organization, syncing and filing tools. If your main aim of using OCR is to go paperless, DEVONthink Pro Office is a powerful solution to make PDFs searchable and organize your documents. Note that is the only DEVONthink product with OCR capabilities. Is more limited and only the Office version includes OCR, professional email archiving and a web server for team collaboration. DEVONthink Pro for Mac support is via email only but there are support forums too. There’s also a so you test drive it yourself.

Pros: Excellent tool to go paperless at home or in the office Syncs with the iOS app Cons: Focused more on document organization than OCR Have you got a document scanner but the OCR software included with it doesn’t work very well? If so, VueScan Pro for Mac could be for you. VueScan is a flatbed scanning OCR software that works with virtually all brands of scanners new and old. The default language for VueScan Pro is English but you can for another 32 languages. VueScan does a very crude job of scanning text in a document or image and dumps it into a text file with no formatting but if you simply need to extract text from a scanned document, it does the job. To create an OCR text file with Vuescan, make sure you’ve purchased the Professional version ($99) not the Standard version ($39.95) which which doesn’t support OCR. Also ensure that your scanner is connected to your Mac and to perform an OCR scan, make sure the “Input” tab is selected and then change the “Options” field to “Professional”.

Then in the “Output” tab, simply select “OCR Output File”. Click “Scan” and then “View” to see the outputted text. The results won’t be perfect and you’ll have a lot of cleaning up to do but it’s definitely quicker than typing an entire document.

If you’re not bothered about formatting and just want a way to extract text from documents in a document scanner, VueScan Pro is an effective way to enhance the OCR capabilities of your document scanner. Pros: Enables your flatbed document scanner to OCR documents Extracts text from documents Cons: Only useful for dumping text into a text file Picatext is an ultra basic and budget OCR app to simply scan and dump text from images. If you just want to extract text from screenshots for example, it’s a very good option.

It does not support PDFs though. Picatext is generally surprisingly good at extracting text from images or screenshots and supports over 40 languages. It does struggle with lower resolution images however and with font styles such as italics. Picatext can only handle one image at a time making it fine for one-off or occasional OCR scanning needs. Simply drag and drop documents into Picatext or access it from the Menu Bar.

If you choose the Menu Bar option, Picatext shows a mini preview of the document and allows you to select all or part of the document that you want to scan. Alternatively, you can access Picatext via hotkey combination TRL-CMD-ALT-P. Any text that extracted by Picatext is automatically copied to your clipboard when done. For those that need an OCR app for images or screenshots on a very limited budget, Picatext is definitely worth a try at just $3.99. Pros: Good at extracting text from images Quick and easy to use from Menu Bar Cons: No PDF support Very basic Only suitable for images Condense is a cheap but effective German OCR app suitable for simple text dumps. If you just want to extract a paragraph or a few lines of text or code from a PDF or image on your desktop, it does an excellent job. Note that Condense does not preserve any type of formatting – it’s very much a “churn and burn” tool for extracting text.

Condense supports 35 different languages and is generally a very quick, easy and effective solution for dumping text into file. Condense sits in your Menu Bar and all you need to to do is select the “Scan” option and use the cross-hairs to select the text you want to scan. We found you need to zoom into a document as much as possible in order to get decent results. Condense also has a handy “QuickFix” tool which can correct badly scanned text. If you want a fast and convenient tool to extract text from images and PDFs on your Mac, Condense is a snip at just $4.99. Pros: Cheap, easy and fast text dumps Supports PDF scanning Cons: Doesn’t edit PDFs Poor accuracy depending on document Conclusion OCR technology on Mac has come a long way over the past ten years. Now produces results just as good as the PC version and is the best Mac OCR software for accuracy, speed, format preservation and ease of use.

If on the other hand you need features like digital signing of PDFs and you already use other Adobe products, is still the PDF market leader. Is There Any Free OCR Software On Mac?

There are some but they’re not very good and they’re mainly online. One of the better ones is the open source Tesseract project which is a text recognizer engine sponsored by Google. Unfortunately, there’s no official user interface as it’s designed mainly for programmers to integrate into their own apps and software but there are projects like PDF OCR X which are based on it. The accuracy of Tesseract is pretty good but it can only dump text into a file and like most free solutions, it doesn’t preserve the formatting of documents.

Advantages Of OCR Technology There are many reasons for using OCR tools to make life easier. Here’s a few of the benefits of using the apps featured here. Save Time: One of the main benefits is that it saves you lots of time having to retype text that is saved in either PDF documents or images such as business cards, receipts and bills. OCR technology has come a long way in recent years and now the best apps can not only extract text from images and PDFs, but even preserve document formatting, layouts, colors and fonts. These OCR apps also allow you to take a photo of a document with your mobile and then use your Mac to OCR it instantly.

Rather than tediously retyping pages of text, these scans can be done in a matter of seconds. Educators for example can save considerable time retyping text and copying images from textbooks or turning paper based materials into digital form for use in class or sharing with colleagues. Edit, Update, Scan & Extract Text: OCR scanning allows you to “unlock” text in images or PDF files that you can’t normally edit. After converting, you can edit or update, scan and extract text from a document that wasn’t possible before.

Once a document or image has been processed, you can search it, copy and paste it into other documents or edit it and for example. Professionals that can particularly benefit from OCR utilities are those such as lawyers with reams of documentation and evidence they need to be able to search and quote quickly or academics that need to catalog and search piles of studies and research.

Reduce Paperwork: It allows you to go paperless in the home or office by creating an archive of PDF files that you can search and retrieve at anytime. This improves organization and helps you locate this quicker than having to go through reams of paperwork. Create eBooks: If you want to read a document on the move on your Kindle or other eBook device, many OCR programs allow you to export documents to ePUB or FB2 format. Text-To-Speech Apps: Once a document has been scanned, you can access them via text-to-speech apps and tools. If you want to search a document for keyword for example using Siri, you can use just say the word and find what you’re looking for quicker.

If you have any problems and questions with any of apps featured here or have any suggestions, let us know in the comments below. You May Also Like:.

Then you can later select any number of images from your iPhone's Photo app and send them to iBooks as one single PDF. It isn't OCRd, it hasn't been turned from photographs of text into something you can search and select, but it's all there and good for things like cooking directions so you don't have to store a box in the freezer when a bag will do, or the like.

Similarly, you can send the photos to just about any iOS app. Apple Notes, for instance, will take them all in one go too —but it will create a note that has each image stored separately. We like PDFpen. It costs and lets you pick out photographs to put into PDFs. That's really meant for adding an occasional photo to some other document, though: you can only select a single image at a time. We'd recommend it for single items like one page or one receipt at a time. It's good for making a fast scan of something you'll only want to glance at later, not work from or share with anybody.

Roll your own You can do a huge amount with photographs in the. You can create a workflow that takes however many images from your Photos app that you choose and work on them. It took us four minutes from an idea to a working and tested Workflow that selects images, makes them into a single PDF and sends them via email. We've previously done more elaborate ones for sending receipt scans to particular Evernote notebooks and shared Dropbox folders. What this does, though, is turn the various stages of scanning and saving into convenient one-tap workflows. It doesn't actually improve the quality of a scan, and it doesn't do anything for coping with the problems you'll find scanning whole documents.

So, Workflow added into the mix is handier than just using the regular Photos app —but not by a great deal. As a result, we recommend it for no more than four pages of documents at a time which will still suit most casual document scanning needs. Dedicated scanning apps If you really want to do larger volume scanning from your iPhone, get either (left) or (right).

They're both first class and jockey with each other for the title of best with each update. These and all dedicated scanner apps use the iPhone's camera and then work to counter —or at least reduce —the common problems in document scanning. Chief amongst those problems is the user.

It's difficult to hold your hand at just the right angle to get the document and just the right position to not get the desk around it. It's quite easy to get the text in focus but then even easier to lose that as you tap the Camera button and nudge your phone. Then even if you get great at doing this for a single sheet, you will never get good at doing hundreds of pages in a row. So when you hold your phone over a document, a dedicated scanning app will look for the edges of the page. Very often it will find them correctly and overlay a clear outline showing the page and obscuring its surroundings. When it's done that, you tap to take the shot and the app solely captures the document part of the image. Reasonably often something will confuse the app and what it thinks is the complete page is out for some reason.

In that case, you tap on what it thinks are the edges and drag them to the right place before taking the shot. Book and document scanning seems intensely personal, and highly dependent on the work situation. These apps will also take the shot for you so that you don't undo that careful positioning by your tap on the phone. Scanbot Pro and Scanner Pro go further by taking shot after shot as you move through page after page: they detect when you've changed page and automatically take a new image. Both of these apps can also do the next thing you usually want when scanning documents —they can use OCR to turn the images into text. We still find that OCR on iOS is slow and error-prone but it does work.

We have used these apps to scan hundreds of pages of documents. You're going to get mistakes and they won't all be the fault of the apps. You'll miss pages, you'll turn a couple of them, you will lose focus in every sense. So we recommend dedicated scanning apps for no more than 30 or 40 document pages per session.

We've fiddled with a few iPhone mounts for scanning, but found them either too expensive, too fragile, too finicky, or all three, so at this point can't recommend any of them. Right tool for the right job Say you've got hundreds or thousands of pages to scan and every one of them is a single sheet. In that case, you use your iPhone for many things but not for actually taking the images.

Instead, look at a hardware document scanner. You can get single-sheet portable ones with the from around $250 or from around $200. Feed a sheet into one of these and that device will do the scanning. Then it can send the image over to your iPhone, iPad or Mac where you can check them out.

The scans you get from these are superb. There are never any focus problems, you never capture more of the desk than you do of the page you wanted and you never accidentally get your thumb in the shot. For fast, you need desktop document scanners like the higher-end Fujitsu ScanSnap models.

In that case you can race through documents at between 25 and 50 pages per minute. The only problem is that they have to be single sheets, they can't be bound books. So for loose document sheets, we recommend the portable hardware scanners for jobs of around 100-200 pages. For 200 to 1,000 pages in any one job, you should get the desktop scanners.

Bound tomes need something different. Right now None of these options are any use when the documents you're scanning are bound.

We've twice done research jobs with around 1,300 pages to scan where hundreds were only bound by paper- or brad-clips but others were hardback books. Some were merely stapled but in an official archive you're not allowed to risk damaging documents by removing those and re-stapling later.

The solution is to get a dedicated document scanning camera. Fujitsu sells one we've used called the which retails at around $1,000. That's pretty steep, and there are others such as the model for around $100. We used the IPEVO and its provided Mac app, Presenter. You'll notice we said Mac app, though. The IPEVO connects over USB but it draws more power than any iPad can currently provide.

So, there's no choice but to plug it into a Mac. Once you do, however, this type of scanner lets you adjust the camera's position so that you can perfectly align it over your document, whatever the size. Then you can adjust the focus, the exposure and the white balance to get the perfect shot. However, we found we could put a document of around 130 pages under the scanner and it would take a shot each time we removed a page. In the end it wasn't quite quick enough for us so we did click and tap to take shots but the process was straightforward.

We didn't even have to adjust the focus as we got down through those 130 pages to the last ones at the bottom. With hardback books, you hold them open and take the shot. Later you can crop in closer to get rid of your fingers in the image. You can also tell the IPEVO's software that the image is of two pages at a time and it will split them where you say. Not the end Scanning entire archives as we have takes patience and requires developing ways to avoid mistakes and handle masses of documents.

Scanning single receipts takes practice to get a good shot too. So the task of document scanning is always involved but the apps and the hardware you can use are also constantly developing.

One major development coming is in Apple's iOS 11 where you'll be able to scan documents directly into Apple Notes. More than just scan them, though, you'll be able to photograph a document at angles you'd normally reject as a mistake and it will produce a correctly sized and shaped document ready for OCR. We'll be interested to see if developers have a hook for this capability for their own apps in the future, which may completely change scanning bound books.

Best Document Scanner For Mac 2017

Book and document scanning seems intensely personal, and highly dependent on the work situation. Let us know your solutions in the comments.