ScanReviver: your phone is the scanner

Last updated: September 2026

A contract that needs to be e-mailed, a receipt for your bookkeeping, homework to hand in: photographed documents look crooked, shadowed and grey. ScanReviver takes that phone photo, finds the page, straightens it and boosts the readability, then hands you a clean image or a PDF.

Open ScanReviver (free) → no sign-up · no watermark · uploads deleted automatically

What ScanReviver does

• Find & straighten: the page is detected in the photo, cropped and de-skewed, so it looks scanned instead of snapped.
• Cleaner & more readable: uneven lighting and shadows are reduced and contrast is improved for crisp text.
• Image or PDF: download the cleaned page as an image, or combine pages into a single PDF. HEIC photos from iPhones work too.

The PDF workbench

ScanReviver grew from a scanner into a full PDF toolset: dozens of tools that cover the everyday PDF jobs, each on its own page, all free and all with the same rule: your file is deleted the moment the result exists.

• PDF to Word, a real, editable .docx with the actual text, not a picture of it. Scans are detected and pointed to the OCR first, instead of handing you an empty document.
• Bank Statement Converter, a PDF bank statement to Excel or CSV: one row per transaction with dates, debits, credits and balances as real numbers, every row checked against the running balance, and nothing saved on the server.
• Merge PDF, up to 20 files into one, with arrows to set the exact order before you press the button. It is a free pdf document merge with no account, no watermark and no cap on how many times you use it, and the result is a pdf to pdf merge: several files in, one file out.
• Compress PDF, three strengths, the size before and after in plain sight, and if your PDF is already tight it says so and returns the original instead of a "compressed" file that grew. You compress the pdf here with three strength presets, and a pdf file compress run works the same from any device with no install. Compress pdf online means exactly that: no account, and it comes back smaller in seconds. Run a compress compressed pdf a second time and it won't get worse: the tool checks first and hands back the original if there's nothing left to shrink.
• PDF to JPG, every page back as a separate image at 96, 150 or 300 dpi, with the whole set in one ZIP.
• JPG to PDF, up to ten photos into one document, each page straightened and cleaned on the way in. When you convert jpg to pdf, each photo is straightened and cleaned first, then saved as pdf, and to convert jpg into pdf for up to ten photos in one document you do exactly the same. Whether the job is a jpg convert to pdf format step or a plain jpg to pdf convert, it is one button, and the jpg as pdf is ready in seconds.
• Searchable PDF (OCR), a hidden text layer over your scan, so the words become selectable and searchable.
• Receipt & document guides, receipts, whiteboards, book pages: each awkward case has its own walkthrough.
• Flatten PDF, bakes filled-in form fields and annotations into the page and removes the editable layer, so the answers can't be changed after you send it.
• Split PDF, pull specific pages out, or break one file into several; this is the split pdf half of the merge tool above.
• Delete Pages from PDF, remove the pages you don't need. Like every tool on this page, your file is deleted the moment you delete pdf page content and download the result. To delete a page in pdf here costs nothing extra: no account, no watermark, no cap on how many times you use it. You can delete page in pdf files without a watermark, unlike iLovePDF or Smallpdf, which meter you with daily limits.
• Unlock PDF, removes a password you know, so you stop retyping it every time the file opens. It works the moment you already know the password: unlock pdf files one at a time and the retyping stops. A plain pdf file unlock is that same button, and it can delete pdf password protection entirely once you've proven you know it.
• Crop PDF, trim the margins or resize the page itself; crop pdf works page-by-page or on the whole file at once.
• HTML to PDF, upload a saved .html page and get back a real html to pdf file with selectable text, not a stretched screenshot; it does not fetch a live URL.
• Repair PDF, rebuilds a file that won't open, was cut off mid-download or throws an error in your viewer.
• Word to PDF, layout, fonts, tables and images stay intact, so the file looks the same on every machine.
• PowerPoint to PDF, one slide per page, fonts and colours exactly as they looked in PowerPoint.
• PDF to PowerPoint, the opposite direction: every page of a PDF becomes its own slide.
• PDF to PDF/A, converts a scan to the ISO format built for long-term archiving, the kind libraries and courts actually accept.

Compared with the big PDF sites: iLovePDF and Smallpdf do more file types, but meter you with daily limits and paywalls. Here there is no account, no watermark and no cap on the PDF tools (the scanner does 10 documents a day): the trade-off is that we only build the tools we can run well on our own hardware.

What happens to your PDF in ScanReviver

What to expect from ScanReviver

Flat, well-framed pages come out great; crumpled paper, extreme angles and photos where a page corner is cut off are harder: the tool reduces shadows and distortion, it doesn't perform miracles on them. Limits (pages per job, file size) are stated on the site itself.

Tools that pair with ScanReviver

Old family photos rather than documents? That's PicReviver's job. Sharing the scan somewhere public? Strip the photo's metadata first with the metadata remover.

Compared with the big PDF sites: iLovePDF and Smallpdf do more file types, but meter you with daily limits and paywalls. Here there is no account and no watermark, and the PDF tools have no daily cap (the scanner does 10 documents a day); the trade-off is that we only build the tools we can run well on our own hardware.

By Sam Ridder, I build and run ShinobiTools on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.

Every PDF and document tool is listed in one place in the PDF tools hub.