What’s new: Scanner App

[DBXCommunity]

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.

• 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? 

[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.

[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.