Smartphones are the Swiss Army knives of the digital world, but not all of their tools are obvious. Case in point: Your camera app is clearly designed to snap photos and capture videos, but did you know that it’s also a mobile scanning app?
If you’re like me, you may have spent years just taking photos of documents—receipts for reimbursement, school and medical forms, and other paperwork—rather than using a hardware scanner or a mobile scanning app.
Snapshots can get the job done, but the results aren’t as good as using your phone’s camera in document-scanning mode, which can automatically crop the image to the paper’s edges and even extract text.
This feature is available on Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones; iPhone owners can scan documents with the built-in Notes app. Here’s how to do it.
