How to scan a multi-page document into one PDF on your phone

Sending a five-page document as five photos in a text message works right up until someone has to file it. Photos arrive out of order, get separated, and are hard to print. One PDF, in the right order, with every page cleaned the same way, is what the person on the other end actually wants.

Before you start

• Put the pages in order before you photograph them. It's much faster than reordering afterwards.
• Pick one spot to shoot every page: a table near a window with a dark surface works well. Doing each page in the same place gives you consistent results across the document.
• Unstaple if you can. Stapled corners curl, and curled pages photograph unevenly. If you can't, hold the page flat at the far edge with a finger kept out of the text.

Step 1: photograph every page

Use your phone's camera and shoot each page in order. Keep the phone flat above each page and leave a little background visible around it — that margin is what lets the scanner find the corners. Don't worry about cropping or straightening; that happens next.

(In the CrunchFile phone app, the Scan button does this step for you: its document camera finds each page's edges as you shoot and keeps the pages together.)

Step 2: turn them into one document

1. Open Scan on getcrunchfile.com and select all the page photos at once — or a PDF that already contains them. They're combined into one document in the order you picked them.
2. Every page is found and straightened automatically. Pages that were already flat are left alone. If a page is marked Check corners, tap Crop corners and drag the corners to fit.

Clean every page the same way

With a multi-page document, the filter you choose applies to all pages by default — the page thumbnails update so you can see it. That keeps the whole document consistent: same white paper, same dark text.

• B&W Clean is the right choice for most text documents and signed forms, and it makes the smallest file.
• Color Enhance keeps colored logos, stamps and highlighting.
• If one page needs something different (a photo page in a text packet, say), switch to This page only, pick that page, and choose its filter.

Fix order and remove extra pages

If a page is out of place or you photographed something twice, use the Edit PDF or Combine tools to reorder, rotate, or delete pages before you send. Delete blank backs of pages too — they add size and nothing else.

Name it and send it

Use a name the recipient can search for: who it's from, what it is and the date, such as Smith Lease Agreement 2026-10-09.pdf or Load 48213 POD.pdf. If the file is too large for email or an upload portal, run it through Compress with a target size.

Common problems

One page is much darker than the others. That page was shot in different light. Re-shoot it in the same spot as the rest, or try the No Shadow filter on just that page.

The pages are different sizes in the PDF. That happens when some photos were taken closer than others. Straightening each page to its detected edges helps; for formal documents, re-shooting the odd page from the same height fixes it.

Text near the spine is curved (books, bound reports). Press the page as flat as you can, or photograph one page at a time with the book opened fully. Straightening can fix a page that's tilted, but not a deep curve.

A consistent spot, pages in order, one filter for everything — and a multi-page document takes a couple of minutes instead of a trip to a scanner.