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Nopload

Clean up scans

Straighten, turn upright, trim and whiten scanned pages, then make them searchable.

Runs on your device

Other sites: 0Check it yourself
  1. 1Add files
  2. 2Set up
  3. 3Download

Tip: You can also drop files anywhere on this page, or paste them.

or drop them here

Accepts PDF

How to use Clean up scans

  1. 01Add one or more scanned PDFs, for example from your phone’s scanner app or the office copier.
  2. 02Choose what to fix and how the pages should look: in colour, in greyscale or in black and white. Leave Make searchable on and pick the document’s language to read the text too.
  3. 03Press Clean up scans and download the tidied PDF. The result says how many pages were cleaned.

About Clean up scans

Clean up scans tidies the pages that come out of phone scanning apps, office copiers and flatbed scanners. Paper laid down at a slight angle comes out crooked; a page fed in the wrong way round comes out sideways or upside down; the scanner lid or the table under a phone leaves a dark frame around the sheet; and uneven light turns white paper grey or yellow, with shadows near the fold. Nopload finds the pages of your PDF that are pictures of paper and fixes each of them: it turns it upright, straightens the lines of text, cuts away the dark border, and evens out the background so the paper is white and the writing stands out. Photos on the page are left looking like photos. The cleaned page goes back at the same paper size, as colour, greyscale or crisp black and white, and an invisible text layer can be added so you can search and copy the words. Pages with real text, such as a typed cover letter in the same file, are kept exactly as they were.

Why your files stay private

Scans are often of things you would never post online: payslips, medical letters, signed contracts, ID cards. Every page is drawn, cleaned and read on your own device, and the PDF is never uploaded to Nopload or anyone else.

Clean up scans: common questions

Which pages are changed?
Only scanned pages: those that are one picture covering most of the page with no real text on it. Pages made on a computer, with text you can already select, are copied unchanged, so a typed letter followed by scanned receipts keeps its letter as it was.
Will photos in my scan be washed out?
No. The background is whitened only where the page looks like paper. Large areas that look like pictures are only brightened a little to match the paper, so photos, stamps and signatures keep their shading.
Should I choose colour, greyscale or black and white?
Keep colour keeps colour only on pages that have some, such as a coloured logo or a highlighter mark; plain pages are stored in grey either way. Greyscale suits letters and forms. Black and white gives the smallest files and the sharpest text, but turns photos into dots, so use it for pages of plain text.
How does it know which way up a page goes?
A page whose lines of text run up and down is turned onto its side, and the shape of the letters tells which way round it reads. With Make searchable on, the reading itself confirms it: a page that is still upside down reads as nonsense until it is turned, so it is turned the way the words come out clearly.
Can I undo the cleanup later?
The download is a new file and your original is not touched, so keep the original if you might want it again. Each cleaned page is stored as a new picture, which replaces the old one and any text layer it had; leave Make searchable on so the new page has its text again.

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