Turn Paper into PDFs with the Preview App

The brand new Preview app on iOS 26 is a really useful tool for organising, editing, and adjusting all those PDF documents you’ve got on your device. Not only that, we can work with photos and other things as well, but we’ll come to that in another video.

Today, I want to show you how you can scan in a physical paper document straight into the Preview app and turn it into a PDF. So, we’re going to tap on Scan Documents at the top here, and we’re going to make sure we’ve got our document on a nice plain table. You don’t want anything too busy or distracting - it will be harder to scan.

I’ve got two tickets here that I want to scan in. I’m going to do one at a time, so I’ll just push one out of the way. You can see straight away that Preview is now going to recognise that document and scan it for you - just like that. Then I can move the second ticket into frame, or the second page in the document, and it will automatically scan that for me as well.

At this stage, I’ve scanned all that I need, but you might have several more pages to scan in. When you’re done, in the bottom left corner, tap on the preview. Here you can see each page of the PDF that’s been made for you.

We’ve got options here to change that scan. The first thing I like doing is making sure that it’s properly cropped to the edges of the page. You don’t want some of the background peeking through - that looks a bit untidy. So we can simply tap on Adjust, and then you’re going to see the whole image that was captured, not just the document. From here, you can grab the corners and carefully rearrange them to make sure it’s a much neater crop. Most of the time, the iPhone does this really well, but every now and then you might want to fine-tune it.

Then, when you’re done with that, you can also try the different filters. These will enhance the document depending on what sort of thing you’re scanning in. My scan has been chosen to be a colour document automatically, but we can change this. If I go onto Photo first of all, that’s what a normal picture would look like. We can try it in Grayscale if you like, but actually the most effective one I’ve found for text or letters is Black & White. Here you get a really crisp, contrasted image that makes the text stand out.

Now, if we go back to the main scanning screen, we can press the tick in the top corner to save that PDF document into the Preview app. It might look like they’re all one document here, but actually in the top left it says 1 of 2. That means both pages are displaying on the screen at once, but they are two separate pages of that document.

Because it’s a PDF, we can do anything we want. We can rename it by pressing the Options button at the top, or we can use the markup tools to highlight key details on the tickets. For example, I might highlight the seating so I can see at a glance where to go.

When you go back out of the document, Preview will automatically save it for you. This is now a PDF document on your phone. And it doesn’t just exist in the Preview app - you can access it in Files as well, or share it by AirDrop or email, just like any other document.

There are lots more things the Preview app can do. Check out my channel down below to see everything else that’s new.