Short, practical walkthroughs for getting clean, searchable documents off your phone — no filler, no ten-paragraph intros. Each guide is something we get asked about constantly: how to scan to PDF on Android, how to shrink a scanned PDF that is too big to email, and how to put a stack of pages into one file. When a step is quicker in the ScannerFlow app, we say so — and when your phone can already do it, we say that too.
Written by Maya Feldman · Free to try on Android
Start here
The complete workflow — from the built-in Google Drive scanner to a full scan-to-PDF-with-OCR pipeline. Where each method wins, and how to get a clean, searchable file every time.
Read the guide →Why scanned PDFs balloon to 20–50 MB, and the practical fixes: scan in grayscale, drop the resolution that matters, and compress without turning your text to mush.
Read the guide →Stop emailing five separate photos. Capture a stack of pages, keep them in order, and export the whole thing as a single, tidy multi-page PDF.
Read the guide →The tools behind the guides
Most of what these guides cover — auto-crop, on-device OCR, multi-page PDFs, compression — happens automatically in ScannerFlow. If you would rather just do it than read about it, start with the scan-to-PDF feature, see how the AI document scanner reads and summarizes what you scan, or browse the full document scanner overview.