Scanning / Photographing 400 A4 Pages for PDF - Help..Please

Tech Support
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HI, I have some old magazines that i would like to photograph and save a lot of pages as PDF’s.

I am looking for advice on how best to achieve this without it taking most of my life :slight_smile: - I have an iphone XS MAX and a tripod whereas i can place the phone looking downwards and photo each page - would it be best to do this on a black background ? - I was considering doing this by adding the pages to apple notes as to save tham as PDFS Automatically - Am i going about this the right way ? any input would be much appreciated - I do have a flet bed scanner but i am reluctant to use it as it will be veryy time consuming hence the Iphone system TIA

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I would recommend using Scanner Pro by Readdle. You can set it to auto mode and it will automatically scan a page when it sees one in the frame. This should speed the process a great deal. Of course you can snap the pic manually too. It finds the page borders, so if you’re on a black background, you could lay a black ruler (for instance) in the fold of the page so that you have a black border all around.

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You asked in the Mac Tech Support forum. Cheapest Mac options are a flatbed scanner or photographing pages then ingesting them and working on them.

I’d use my iPhone XS Max with either Scanner Pro or Scanbot apps.

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Do you want to keep them? If not, I would just cut them and throw them into a scanner with feeder. Done in minutes.

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I did something very similarly recently. Great thing about Scanner also is it’s auto page detection so you just have to flip pages and it auto captures. Really really great.

One warning: stop and save the files every 100 pages or so. I scanned 300+ pages only to find the memory maxed out or something because it gave me a processing spinner for 10 minutes before I liked the app and stated again.

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HI and thank you for all your suggestions it’s very much appreciated :slight_smile: I tried the scanner apps and although they work well , it would take far too long to achieve what was needed as i worked out there are 50 mags of approx 75 pages each - so I got a Canon portable scanner - which was truly dreadful - the software was from 1970 - and when i updated it it refused to work, it jammed more pages than it scanned, so back it went , I finally got Fujitsu SnapScan S1300i - and my life was saved ! it runs great scans nicely and only jams when i put too many pages in ! - Top tip really is to cut the pages out squarely from the Mag and it works a treat I can do about 5 mags an hour including checkin them -:slight_smile:

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If you know someone with, or have a bandsaw, you can cut the spines off of the mags in stacks, rather than cutting pages out.