Bob's Most Useful Apps - Part 1- Camscanner+

Camscanner+ is a really clever idea that can be used in a number of ways to improve your day to day workflow. At it's heart it is a really simple app - take photos of anything - documents, whiteboards, receipts - and Camscanner+ will store images of them on your phone for later reference.

Thats not all though. First off, Camscanner+ will enhance images with a clever algorithm that identifies only the relevant part of an image and zooms, flattens and centres the subject to produce a very readable document. After that, it applies an enhancement filter to up the clarity of the final image.

 

Take a photo of a document or receipt...

... and Camscanner+ automatically enhances and aligns the image

The application also allows folder based grouping of documents so that you can, for example, record all the receipts for a particular business trip together. You can also add metadata tags to the content to further categorise documents.

 

Camscanner+ folder view

The app has a large number of export options to choose from. As well as the usual email option, Camscanner+ integrates Google Docs, Evernote, iDisk, Box.net, Dropbox. My favourite workflow is scanning all my receipts for a particular business trip into a folder, exporting a PDF of all the documents in the folder to Dropbox for safekeeping and then sending that directly to our expenses people for remittance. No more posting receipts for me! My only complaint is that it appears to be impossible to control the image size of the documents within the PDF, potentially creating a very large file depending on the number of documents you have.

The other great use for Camscanner+ is scanning whiteboards and the enhancement tools generally produce a very clear result. If you are looking for something to quickly scan documents, receipts and diagrams Camscanner+ is the tool of choice.

Camscanner+ can be found on the Apple App Store for £2.99.  I'm not affiliated with the app in any way ... I just really like it!