Intelligent document management solution covering a range of devices.

Free - $4.99/mo. or $49.99/yr.

CamScanner allows you to access, edit and manage documents anytime and anywhere it suits you. Any document that exists in the physical world can be digitized with the app and saved on your phone. This can include anything from business cards to legal documents.

You can add notes and tags, copy documents, and even merge documents. Users can also share documents in PDF or JPEG formats with collaborators via email. Wireless printing is also possible using Google Cloud Print.

The interface is clean and not overwhelming. It offers graphical clues for each function. For example, if you have no documents available, the app displays outlines of documents and images. To begin to create documents, you need to digitize a document by taking a picture of it.

Taking a picture of a document is fairly simple. From the home page, select the camera icon at the bottom of the screen. It will pull up your phone’s camera and if it is your first time accessing the camera from CamScanner, it will ask you to grant permission to allow CamScanner to access your camera. Tap yes and you will be free to take a picture of your document. Allowing the app to access your phone’s camera does not mean that the app will be able to control the camera. The actual snapping of the picture is not difficult at all, but getting the distance, angle and lighting to look right might take a couple of tries until it suits your needs.

I had no problem reading the document I digitized. Once you save the first image, it will appear on CamScanner’s home screen. Making basic edits on your phone isn’t easy, but I can see how the function could be useful in the right circumstances. One or two quick edits while you are on the go is possible, but wholesale rewriting of sentences or paragraphs is not advisable.

The search function works well, although you have to select your language (English) before the text is available for searching, which seems odd. If you download the app in English, it would be helpful if English were the default language so as to avoid that step. You can perform a search using any keywords or tags associated with your documents.

The next icon across the top can change the view of your documents to list view or table view. This seems dependent on personal taste to determine utility, but it’s nice that the option is there.

The third icon, which is a pair of arrows next to each other, allows a user to sort the documents in the program by a number of criteria ranging from creation date to alphabetically. Again, it is a handy feature to have.

CamScanner

 

The bulk of the other features can be found using the last icon, a check mark in a box. Here is where you can perform such actions as locking, tagging, merging or deleting a document. Tapping More will open up other options such as emailing the image. You can select to send it as a JPEG, a PDF or even a text file. Sharing is an excellent way to collaborate with your colleagues, friends or family on a project.

It is easy to password-lock a document. Simply tap the check mark on the top right and options will appear at the bottom. To be able to use one of the options, tap the document you wish to perform an action on and then click the action at the bottom. Tapping lock after selecting a document will prompt you to enter a password. It will ask you to enter this password twice for verification purposes. Once a file is locked, you will constantly be asked for the password to perform most actions on the document, which I found irritating. Also, the app does not provide a preview of a document once it is locked. To remove the lock feature on a document and unlock a file, simply tap the check mark at the top right of the program and then tap unlock at the bottom-left corner once your locked document is selected. CamScanner allows you to upload your documents to a storage provider (cloud). This can be done manually or automatically. Storage providers that are currently supported include Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and OneDrive.

You can change the attributes of a document by selecting attributes from the More menu. This allows to you to change the document name, tags and more. Creating a PDF from your image document is as simple as clicking ‘PDF preview.’ The PDF is clear and quite readable.

There is a premium version of the app available as well that costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 for a year. That gets you 10 gigabytes of space (you only get 200 megabytes of space with the free version), expanded editing ability, auto-uploading of documents to your choice of storage provider and much more.

CamScanner is not alone in the document scanning and management space, but it is a very popular app with a strong following. Its 4+-star rating in Apple’s App store is proof of that. Say goodbye to the scanning feature on your printer; you won’t need it. Just snap a photo of your document with your mobile phone, create a PDF or JPEG, and work on it yourself or email it to others for collaboration.

CamScanner (for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8)

Free - $4.99/mo. or $49.99/yr.