Most of us scan with our phones now. The photos work, but they arrive as separate images, sometimes sideways, with grey paper and shadows. Here is how to turn them into one document that looks like it came out of a scanner.
Take better photos
- Lay the page flat on a darker surface so the edges stand out.
- Use daylight or a bright room, and avoid your own shadow over the page.
- Hold the phone straight above the page, not at an angle.
- One page per photo, filling most of the frame.
Make the PDF
- Copy the photos to your computer, through WhatsApp Web, a cable or your cloud folder.
- Open Kifuli and choose Images to PDF.
- Drop in the photos and drag them into page order.
- Set Page size to A4, Look to Clean scan, and keep "Put all images in one PDF" on.
- Click Make PDF.
Clean scan evens out shadows, whitens the paper and darkens the text. The result reads better on screen, prints better and makes much smaller files.
Make the text searchable
Your new PDF is still made of pictures. To search it or copy text out of it, run it through Make scans searchable. Choose English, Kiswahili or both. Kifuli adds an invisible text layer, so the pages look exactly the same but the words can be found and selected.
Send it
If the PDF is too big for an email or upload form, run Compress PDF on it. Everything above happens on your computer, which matters when the pages are IDs, certificates or medical forms.