How to scan with the Drive app on your phone

In this post, we’re going to look at how to use the scanner in the Google Drive app. It’s quick and easy to use and available to both Android and iOS.

How to scan using the Drive app scanner

Click on the Drive app on your phone.

Tap the document icon to open the scanner.

Point your camera at the thing you want to scan. By default, it will automatically try to grab what you are trying to scan. You don’t need to tap the take a photo button.

This will store the scan in your app on the left. These scans will become a PDF with one page per scan. You can scan more than one page, just by lining up the next page/document and it will store it, which will be in the same PDF.

How to edit the scan

To edit the scan, tap on the scan. There are 4 options at the bottom:

• Crop the scan
• Change the colour of the scan
• Rotate the scan
• Delete the scan

Plus, at the top you can retake the scan if it hasn’t come out the way you want it.

Here, I’ve tapped the crop icon and I can line up the scan. Then tap “Done”. Notice, the original capture wasn’t straight but the final scan was automatically corrected.

The second option is to change the colour of the scan.

The third option is to rotate it and the final one to delete it.

How to change the scanning options

At the top when we’re scanning, we have 3 options:

• To turn the flash on, off, or let it work automatically.
• Change the colour as we saw above but when we are scanning not have to edit it afterwards.
• Use the auto shutter or take the scan manually. Generally, the auto-scan is quick and accurate but sometimes, you may want to manually scan something. To do so, just take Auto and change it to Manual (as we can see below).

Tapping the flash icon, brings up the 3 flash options.

Tapping the colour icon brings up the 4 options.

Once you are happy with the scan(s), tap “Save”.

How to save the scan to your Drive

Here, you can change the filename and the location of where you want to store the file on your Drive.

Click “Save” and you can see it’s saved it to my Drive as a PDF.

Note, the screenshots are taken from the iOS version of the app. Click here, for instructions on how to use the Android version, which works in a similar way.

This is a great way to quickly scan documents, photos, etc and store them on your Drive.

See how quick it is to scan using the Drive app here in this quick video.

You can find more tips here.