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What’s new: Scanner App

There’s nothing worse than forgetting an idea, or losing an important piece of paper. The one thing we never lose, and usually don’t forget is our phone - so now with the Dropbox Scanner App, you can save, organize, and share important documents right from your phone. Dropbox Scan is a standalone app that lets you quickly transform all your physical documents into high-quality PDFs. It’s everything you love about doc scanner in the Dropbox app—but even faster and easier to use. The app is available to iOS users in English-speaking markets, and you can sign into Dropbox with your corp email or a Basic, Plus, or Professional account. Whatever the situation, whether it’s a piece of paper, a receipt or even a whiteboard of notes, you can conveniently save high quality scans to Dropbox.

Scanner app .png

Receipts - Take the pain out of your next expense report, and save receipts as you go.
Whiteboard drawings - Never feel rushed in a meeting or presentation again. Just use the doc scanner, and an image of the whiteboard will be uploaded as a PDF or PNG to Dropbox.
Contracts, bills, and invoices - Now your filing cabinet can be digital, and take up a lot less space. And of course, you can share it with others who need access.
Photos - We’ve all taken a photo of a photo, but now you can scan them and keep them safe, with the same phone - just better results.
Business cards - Never lose an important connection! Easily upload business cards from meetings, conferences and trade shows—right from your mobile device.
Magazine clippings - Instead of ripping out a piece of a magazine or newspaper scrap you will inevitably lose, just scan the page or excerpt into Dropbox using the document scanner.
Personal cards and notes - Scan those thoughtful personal notes into Dropbox for keepsakes without the clutter.
Handouts - Scan in materials from classes or seminars for easy reference— they’re a lot less likely to get crumpled or torn in a digital setting!
Napkin sketches - Never lose your next big idea again.

There’s a Smart crop feature, Smart folder suggestions based on where you've saved recent scans, and you can even edit the scan for clarity!

You can probably tell we’re a little excited about this one! Which of these uses are you excited about?

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Comments

T111

When will an Android version be available?

lenmac

None of the new suggestions really appeal to me. The programme is of little use to me as the things that are important to me I am unable to find on my hard drive. They are there, i.e. my 2500 contacts and my email. The two most important things for me but where are they? Not easy to find like photos or docs. What about an easy video for those less familiar with modern tech?

Team Harris

When is this going to be available for Android?

I have never understand why companies develop an app to only be available for ios user before it is available for Android. It's as if Android user are second class.

Vdg

Just downloaded the app tonight. Tried to use it to scan some receipts for an insurance claim.. got 2 ok scans, 1 barely acceptable and the last I just gave up after over 10 tries and no useable scan. It is something wrong in the conversion to pdf , because the initial capture looks ok.

this is a great idea and I love that it connects right to Dropbox. I often have trouble saving directly to Dropbox from my iPhone or iPad. I probably won't use until it is fixed.

pamee48

I tried to locate tris App on my andoid phone in Playstore but couldnt find it. Where is it?

Chewbyka

This forum is just users talking amongst ourselves Dropbox isn't reading or not bothering to respond. Simple question, when will Android app be available and no response. Waste of time.

Kjohns

Convenient, but poor quality scan. Check out CamScanner: http://cc.co/16WuWg

Amy

Hi everyone, thanks for your interest! Currently the iOS app is available to download, and we’ll let the team know of the interest in an Android version.

pamee48

Spoiler

Why is it not available on android phones, not all of us can afford an Iphone

Seraphin

How is this different from the scanning function already built into the Dropbox app?

JackLv

Not excited about any, as I have an Android device and it is only available for ios. Hate when companies show preference to one operating platform especially when I pay for the premium service. It also looks like Dropbox makes no replies to it's users in here. 🙁 Seeing lots of posts that are 2 weeks old with no comments from Dropbox.

Gregg T.

try the Office Lens app, from Microsoft. Although it has a flaw when converting a image taken with a rotated camera to a PDF, it does everything that this Scan app does, but saves to OneDrive. It's a bit tedious to have to copy documents from OneDrive to dropbox, but the scan quality is generally excellent.

Amy

Hi @JackLv, sorry to hear about your frustration, and we will certainly pass your feedback on to the development team re Andrioid apps.

Amy

Dropbox Scan is a standalone app for power scanners or those looking for a simple scanning solution on mobile. The Dropbox mobile app is a comprehensive cloud storage app that offers numerous features within it including document scanning.

Gregg T.

dropbox Scan is not stand-alone. after starting, you eventually get to a screen with a single button: start the dropbox app. when you do that, you can then choose “scan a document” from within the dropbox app (not in the Scan app now). after you’ve scanned your first document, a NEW button appears in Scan to capture the second document, and from then on you are not forced to use the Dropbox app, even if you deleted all the documents. I’m guessing it’s done like this because Scan has no way to choose the Dropbox you’re going to put your scan into, IOW, it is NOT stand-alone FOR AUTHENTICATION. This is a design disaster; users will repeat the first sequence they learn, and so they will never learn to start the Scan app first.

Gregg T.

After I’ve scanned a multi-page PDF and saved it, how do I add a new page to it via Scan?

It always wants to create a new PDF, which would be fine if there was some way to combine the pages of the 2 documents together in Scan. This means I have to get the Scan exactly right before saving it, but in many cases I don’t know if it’s going to be right until I display the PDF in context (and find it there’s glare or I cropped it wrong) or try to print the PDF (and find out the scan doesn’t fit on the page)

Team Harris

As I stated in my post, when is this going to be available for Android?

I have never understand why companies develop an app to only be available for ios user before it is available for Android. It's as if Android user are second class.

Gregg T.

it seems that camScanner charges to scan a multi-page PDF. true?

Seraphin

For basic document scanning, I'm not seeing much of a difference in capabilities and scanning experience between using the Scan app and the main Dropbox app. The Scan app does avoid an extra click or two by providing a default location and quality setting.

I see a difference in scan quality and file size. Scan app files are more than twice as big (1.5MB vs. 525KB) at highest quality. Reducing quality on either platform to balanced/medium reduces file size by about a third (1MB or 424K, respectively). I don't understand why the files are so huge - I produce a file a tenth of the size (116K for the same doc) from my Epson desktop scanner. The Scan app did a better job ignoring highligher marks on the page - unless you wanted to see these on the PDFs as well - the highlights are completely gone on the scan. But it also did a worse job preserving lighter color text on the page - these indicate to me that it is using a lower threshold for discerning white vs. black.

Good to have options, I suppose. But based on my quick and dirty comparison here, I might just stick with the main Dropbox app for now. It avoids the need for yet another app, produces smaller files, and offers some additional control (e.g., manually selecting document corners); it's even already there for Android.

It might make sense for Dropbox to instead provide a widget to provide a direct path to the main app's scanning function, that provides a more streamlined capture experience. Smaller (much smaller) file sizes and a darkness/threshold control wouldn't hurt either. Oh, and OCR to embed searchable text.

JackLv

Hi @Gregg T. I currently use Adobe Scan which works great but does not allow me to save to DropBox

Gregg T.

Great analysis Seraphin. There is a control for contrast in Scan but it's not active for the documents I've snapped so far. Maybe it's dependent on using the monochrome image (black and white)? Don't know.

I think it's hard to compare file sizes between devices because the color gamut (number of colors captured) varies so significantly. If you capture fewer colors, the file size will, of course, be smaller since it's representing less information. I think what's important, instead of file size, might be how crisp and readable you find the text, especially in a print, which influences how accurate/fast the OCR process will be.

I don't see why having a stand-alone app matters, anyway... Do you?

Seraphin

Gregg, I'll have to look for that contrast control. My file size comparisons were for similar format and quality (as in "readable 8-pt text" in b&w). There isn't any control over capture resolution, so that can't really count as a factor. From a use case perspective, these were different file sizes for effectively the same output. Now, if they provided some control over capture resolution, we could have a meaningful discussion of what settings (in addition to the ones already provided) deliver the best balance of usable output vs. file size.

But Dropbox isn't alone with file size inflation for PDF docs. I compared output once between Adobe Acrobat, Camscanner, Microsoft Lens, and maybe one other app to see which one worked best for me. They were all bloated to an extent. I opted for Dropbox primarily because I like working in the Dropbox cloud with its straighforward file organization and sharing schemes.

To be clear, I really like the Dropbox (main app) scanning function. It has some room for improvement, but it is still one of the better mobile PDF capture options available. I'm not so sure that Dropbox Scan brings ME any benefit, besides saving a few clicks, and perhaps providing a slightly different contrast result that might be favorable in certain situations, but to others, these differences might very well be killer features.

EDIT: I ran a few more test scans. Dropbox Scan's lowest quality setting seems similar to the main app's highest quality setting. You get a lot more dithering at the lower quality settings with the main Dropbox app. So... their quality settings are not really equivalent. It's possible that Scan captures at a higher resolution to start with; I would have to extract images and compare the bitmaps to really know. Also, I stumbled upon multi-page scanning with Scan. That's a big plus. I also stumbled upon the contrast control with the main app - good to have it.

Software and Platform apps

😄

AlistairD

Really pleased that part of my annual Dropbox fee is being spent on developing iOS apps that my Android handset can't use.

Eric Delisle

App is interesting, works nicely on a Android 10, but image auto acquirying system is to nervous!, app should let us take the picture without trying to do by itself, at least have the option to switch off that facility or make it more slow.

Once you take your shoot, we should be able to magnify image ( on the picture visualization screen), so we can approve the picture quality before going on.

The screen for adjusting the picture is very good. It shows the entire picture, even if the nervous sistem acquired only part of it, we can adjust correctly to the edges with the magnifying sistem.

Saving is simple and efficient.

edc1951

Completely agree. It gets very tiring. And it would be nice to have an answer from Dropbox about when they DO plan to have it available.

lindajbrander

Amy - given that there are more android users than iOS, I would have thought 'the team' would be aware there

would be interest. There are more than 2 billion android users on the planet for goodness sake!!!

JackLv

Hi Gregg, I do the same, it would make life much easier if I could just save directly to drop box as I use it a lot. Maybe we should be tasking to Adobe.

Mary Rose L

I am interesting in the Photo scanner and Magazine/clippings scanner. Please let me know what this involves by return email. Thank you

Gregg T.

Android camera-based app’s are far more expensive to develop than iOS apps since there are 100’s of combinations of camera hardware and brands to test in the Android world. iOS has 3, and targeting only 2 of them gets your app running on 80% of the deployed hardware.

Plus, Dropbox is interested in secure environments, and indeed is required to ONLY use secured platforms for some of their contracts (but not for their consumer versions); Android, OTOH, is virus-ridden. iOS DOES have a few viruses but Apple has far more robust mitigation efforts than Google & the Android companies have.