PDFScanner - Scanning and OCR

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)

• 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 (requires macOS Big Sur or later)

• 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 Catalina up to Sonoma including native support for Apple Silicon Macs. It is only available on the Mac App Store.