Document Scanner — Photos to Clean PDF, Offline
Import phone photos or capture pages live from your webcam, and MiniMax Converter auto-crops, deskews and flattens the lighting on each one, then assembles a single clean multi-page PDF — with an optional searchable OCR text layer. Runs locally: no upload, no file-size limit, no watermark, and your originals are never touched.
How to use it
- Import your photos (JPG, PNG, etc.) or click Capture to grab pages live from a webcam — each shot becomes a page in the list.
- Select a page to preview it and drag a box to crop the area you want to keep; reorder, rotate or delete pages as needed.
- Pick a cleanup mode — No filter, crisp Black & White, lighting-flattened Grayscale, or perspective-corrected Color — and tick Make searchable if you want an OCR text layer.
- Click Create PDF and choose where to save your multi-page document; the originals stay exactly as they were.
What you get out of it
Each page runs through the same pipeline as a dedicated scanner app: automatic edge detection and perspective correction to flatten a page shot at an angle, lighting flattening to kill shadows and glare, and deskew to straighten it. Black & White mode gives the classic crisp scanned look; Grayscale keeps tone but evens the lighting; Color perspective-corrects without thresholding for receipts and photos. Prefer the raw image? No filter leaves it untouched.
Searchable PDFs with OCR
Tick Make searchable and the app runs Tesseract OCR over each page, embedding an invisible, selectable text layer behind the image so you can search and copy text from the finished PDF. It recognizes a wide multilingual set out of the box (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian). OCR is honestly imperfect on poor photos — if a language pack is missing it falls back to an image-only PDF rather than failing.
Why offline?
Online scanner apps and CamScanner-style services upload your documents to their servers, often cap page counts or file sizes on free tiers, and stamp watermarks onto the output. A document scanner is exactly the kind of thing you don't want leaving your machine — contracts, IDs, invoices, medical forms. Here everything is processed locally at SSD speed: no upload, no page limit, no watermark, no account.
Questions and answers
Can I scan straight from my webcam instead of importing photos?
Yes. Click Capture to open a live webcam view and grab each page as a frame; every capture is added to the page list just like an imported photo. You can mix captured and imported pages in the same document.
Will the text in my PDF be searchable and selectable?
Only if you tick Make searchable, which runs OCR and embeds an invisible text layer behind each page image. Without it, you get a clean image-only PDF. OCR accuracy depends on the photo quality — sharp, well-lit pages give the best results.
Does it modify my original photos?
No. All cropping, deskewing and cleanup happen on copies, and the result is written to a new PDF file. Your original image files are never altered or deleted.
How many pages can I scan into one PDF?
There is no page limit. Because it runs locally rather than through an upload-based service, you can assemble as many pages as you like into a single PDF, constrained only by your own disk and memory.
Related tools
Get MiniMax Converter
Cross-platform desktop app. Linux free for non-commercial use; Windows & macOS one-time €20 license. No subscription, no telemetry, no account.