Think of Scanner Pro as a simple and inexpensive mobile scanning utility that makes it easy to photograph and save documents. It won't raise your eyebrows and make you say, "Wow" even once, but you'll probably find yourself muttering, "Yeah, that's useful" a few times. At its heart, Scanner Pro (which costs $4.99 and is for iOS only) is a mobile scanning application that does its job well, without fanfare or powerful extra features. And you may be perfectly fine with that. While it includes optical character recognition (OCR), unlike some competitors such as Genius Scan Plus , it still falls behind them and Editors' Choice winner Abbyy FineScanner (Visit Site at ABBYY) due to an annoyingly confusing user interface (UI) and a lack of feature depth.
Good, Easy Image Capture
Capturing images is straightforward: With a single click, you can take a photo of a document and, like most of the tools reviewed here, Scanner Pro saves it as a JPG or PDF file. Actually, you barely need that single click: An auto-capture function lets you hover your phone over the page and the software figures out which part of the image is really a "document." That's a boon when you're trying to snap a receipt in a dark restaurant bar after a couple of Mai Tais.
As with other mobile scanning apps, you can create multi-page documents so that all pages in a contract are kept together or several book pages are stored in a single file. You can also capture images from your iPhone's camera roll.
One feature that Scanner Pro can justifiably crow about is its ability to remove visual distortion from scanned images. For instance, if you scan a page from an old magazine, you're bound to get some visual twist from the open pages, with the text towards the fold looking somewhat squashed. Scanner Pro automatically fixes that distortion (you can always turn off that feature, though I'm not sure why you'd want to). The distortion adjustments aren't perfect—nothing like the excellence with which our Editors' Choice Abbyy FineScanner manages columns and page breaks—but it's mighty impressive for a simple-to-use app.
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Abbyy FineScanner
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Dropbox Business
Intsig CamScanner
Shoeboxed
TurboScan
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Genius Scan Plus
Scanner Pro doesn't use any kind of file tagging (like "legal," or "receipts," for example) to make it easier to sort through travel receipts or to find Grandma's recipe for chocolate cake. Instead, you create folders in which to organize your various scanned files and then name them yourself, such as "Articles" or "Receipts." That works, though personally I prefer to tag files since not everything fits in a single category.
Files are saved on the phone but, in practice, you want to access to them elsewhere as well. Scanner Pro does a decent job here, permitting you to store documents on Box, Dropbox , Evernote, Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive ($5.00 Per User Per Month at Microsoft 365 for Business) , OneNote, or any WebDav server. Once you connect your accounts, Scanner Pro can be set to automatically upload image files.
All This and Text Recognition, Too
Scanner Pro does text recognition on the fly by using OCR built into the software that's running on your local phone rather than relying on a cloud or human-managed service, like Shoeboxed (Visit Site at Shoeboxed) does. As with the other on-device OCR apps, though, there's a tradeoff between time and quality: expect to spend some quality word processor time editing the text that Scanner Pro omits.
However, doing that brings up another problem, namely that Scanner Pro has limited ways to deal with the text. Either you edit it in the company's PDF Expert app (a $9.99 add-on) or you copy the text to the phone's clipboard. Then you have to figure out where to paste the verbiage scraped from your document. Mostly, the answer is "Launch another app into which to paste it," which is irksome. In practice that meant I wound up emailing the text to myself. It's surprising that the app doesn't make it easier to get to the text or to save it.
For an on-phone OCR engine, though, Scanner Pro does a good job. You do need to fix up the results, but it does about as well as some of the more expensive mobile scanning apps. As one example of its competence in this realm:
"It's tempting to say that everything goes with chocolate. Yet being so strong, chocolate merely coexists with a lot Of those other things. One item that goes beautifully with chocolate is vanilla, already present in con- ventional chocolate in a calibrated amount.)"
The above example isn't bad but you'll need to spend some time correcting that before sending that scan to anyone else.
Scanner Pro has a few other features that may or may not matter to you. For 99 cents, you can fax the PDF or JPG file to any phone number, including those stored in your address book. You can control file names with templates and generate workflows for common sets of tasks (such as "change the name to include the date and save this to Evernote"). Also, you can set a password on the PDF documents.
An Uneven UI
All this might be more welcome if the UI was easier to figure out. I found myself poking at the app—often with irritation and ire in my heart—because I knew I'd seen a way to accomplish something, only I wasn't sure how to find it. For example, the overall document screen shows options along the bottom: Add, Share, Edit. Then there's another three-dot menu at the top right-hand side with more options (Show as Text, Edit with PDF Expert, Set Password on PDF, and Delete Document). I'd rather see one lineup of options without the need to look in two places.
Still, there's nothing to actively dislike in Scanner Pro. It's really…okay. However, with so many other options that provide more functionality even in the same price range (such as Genius Scan or ScanBot), there's no particular reason to choose this app over the others, either. Basically, it depends on your particular tastes. Give it a try and see if it suits you.
Scanner Pro provides the fundamentals of mobile document scanning, with niceties including document folders, cloud storage support, and OCR. But it's marred by a sometimes-confusing user interface.
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