Quickly scan documents on the Mac using a hardware scanner or your iPhone. Recognize the text (OCR) and save as PDF (or PDF/A) files using an intuitive user interface
There are many applications for macOS that allow scanning of images or text. Most of them are however complex, slow or not really suited for scanning documents or letters.
PDFScanner has been created with one simple task in mind: Scanning and archiving documents as quick and easy as possible, and making them findable with Spotlight search.
When performing OCR, PDFScanner adds the recognized text directly to the scanned image as an invisible layer, so the text can be selected and copied just like in other PDF files.
PDFScanner supports the following features:
• Support for all scanners that are supported by the macOS Image Capture application (please check that using the scanner in Image Capture works before purchasing to be sure)
• Direct scanning with the iPhone or iPad camera. Perspective correction is done on device and with adequate lighting the quality comes close to using a real scanner. This feature requires your Mac and iOS device to be logged in with the same iCloud account and the "Handoff" feature to be activated on both devices.
• Optical character recognition to make the document searchable, allow to find it via Spotlight and other search tools or copy the text.
• Supported OCR languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish and Finnish
• Intuitive and fast user interface to reorder, delete or edit pages
• Fully automatic straightening of crooked pages (deskew), manual correction also available
• Full multithreading support. Scanning, OCR and straightening is done on multiple pages in parallel and you can even reorder or delete pages while PDFScanner is still working
• „Fake Duplex“ mode to simplify scanning of double sided documents without a duplex scanner
• Saving to PDF (optionally compressing the scan inside the PDF to save disk space). PDFScanner can perform super high compression for monochrome scans (usually smaller than 50kb per page including OCR text)
• Supports PDF/A for long-term archiving
• Customizable file name patterns (include for example date, time and machine name in the filename) - PDFScanner can even guess the document title and date from the OCR text.
• It is also possible to open or import existing PDF documents and perform OCR on them via a menu option (the language can be set in the Preferences).
• Advanced users can use the included Automator action to create custom OCR workflows or folder actions
PDFScanner runs on all macOS versions starting with 13.5 Ventura and is compatible to Tahoe, Golden Gate and future releases. It is only available on the Mac App Store.
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Makes my one sided scanner see both sides
Episky
I have an ancient mac mini (6 years old) and a Brother all in one “Work Smart” Series scanner. I got the scanner for the feeder so I could scan the piles upon pile and piles of paper I have. Well that was fine until I noticed many papers had two sides. So what to do? Buy a new scanner? Heck naw. I looked for some app to help me. After reading the reviews I picked this.Someone mentioned that the Fake Duplex, which is the part I needed, didn’t work. I was afraid of that too when I first got it. Trick is, you have to scan it then take the pile, put in face up (face down to scan the front side on my scanner) and scan again, and after it is done scanning and anything else your scanner wants to do, hit “Fake Duplex” and viola! Perfect document. However you have to double check the page count because if you have a funny scanner that skipped a page, it won’t match up right.I’ve docked a star because the app has started to pretend that it doesn’t know my scanner is there, So to deal with that I have to close out the app, wait 1 minute and go back and everything is fine. My basic scanner programs never ignored the scanner. Sometimes it says it is scanning when it clearly is not. The rotating is limited to 90degrees at once. I wish I could rotate 180 or choose the direction of the rotation. I wish I could manipulate the DPI a bit more. These problems are minor and tolerable.All in all great program for my needs. The OCR is ok. Not super, just okay.
Excellent for Small File Size & Duplex Documents
adville
This is a very handy scanning app—I find that for most daily use, it has replaced my use of Apple’s Image Capture (which itself is just a front end on the scanning interface Apple provides to most third party apps). Beyond what Apple provides, one excellent feature is the support of JBIG2 compression for very small file size for 1-bit black and white scans. It can even be used for importing a pre-existing grayscale scan of a black and white document, converting it to 1-bit and saving it with JBIG2. Another is its “Fake Duplex” mode, for scanning double-sided documents in a scanner that only scans one side: scan one side through the document feeder, flip the document and scan the other side (back of the last page first), press the Fake Duplex button and it will properly re-order the pages and delete any blank last page. Its main limitation is that, as the name suggests, it is limited to the PDF file format—no PNG, TIFF, or JPG (though it does support jpg image data within PDF files). And I find you have to watch out for mixed-type files defaulting back to grayscale or color—you may need to re-convert it to black & white and re-save—it’s not great at handling different compression where some pages are b&w and others color. But given its utility and modest feature set, that’s not enough to dock it a star.
Works as Advertised
Gerry Pete
I am running Big Sur, Parallels Desktop and Wndows 10 on a 27" iMac, all of which are recently installed. I was unable to use any of the available software (Image Capture, HP Scan, HP Smart, etc.) to scan a multipage document in the proper order without manually reorganizing the pages which is not acceptable if you do a lot of scanning as I do. I had previously used Adobe Acrobat DC to scan documents on an HP Envy desktop computer to an HP All-in-One Print/Scan/Fax/Copy unit which provided duplex scanning with no problem. Running Adobe Acrobat DC on the new configuration cited above, however, caused the document feeder to freeze after scanning one page. After much time, research and effort with zero help from Adobe Support (if my firewall program provided as good of isolation between my system and the malware source as Adobe provides between the users and their product support, I would never have a problem with malware), I found that the problem was apparently the driver. I changed the driver from the Secure Airprint driver that was automatically assigned by the operatign system to the native HP driver and the duplexing finally ran properly. I decided to investigate other alternatives to Adobe Acrobat DC for scanning purposes and discovered PDFScanner. Based on the reviews I purchased the product from the Apple App Store and couldn't be more satisfied. I scanned a multipage document on the HP 7612 (document feeder) and Epson XP-630 (flatbed) with perfect results. I am canceling my paid monthly subscription to Adobe and am now up and running with PDFScanner.
Truly Essential Tool
zelig who
I love this app. If you want to keep organized records that you can search or go totally paperless then this is a great app. Use it with my All In One printer/fax/scanner unit and this app goes where the native printer offerings don’t. Fast OCR and smart adjustments either automatic or custom have allowed me to power through several banker’s boxes of records of all kinds to create readable and searchable scans even from items with low contrast grayscale information. This app would have no problem making short work of a huge amount of business records. Auto deskew works great so no problem if the sheet feeder is a little sloppy. File saving and naming options including option to include scan date (year, week, month, second), or custom naming make quick work for organizing scanned files as they are processed. Also quckly processed MS Word docs to searchable PDF’s (Print to PDF, then open with PDF Scanner to automatically OCR). So happy with this app and the support from developer. Two thumbs waaaay up!
* Remember USB Scanners correctly after restart
* Compatibility updates for the latest macOS
* Bug fixes and performance improvements
Version 2026.7
The developer, Felix Rotthowe, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
