How to scan documents with WhatsApp directly

College documents, your bill from the last office party, your electricity bill or even a quick scan of your Aadhaar Card – we’ve all had to resort to our phones to scan these documents (and others) at some point in time. Unfortunately, we’ve all also gone through the struggle of juggling between multiple third-party apps for scanning these documents. Well, you don’t need to do that anymore.

WhatsApp now supports document scanning natively, and it’s not done a shabby job at it either. The app now has a full-fledged document scanner built-in, armed with multiple options to crop, adjust, change the colour filter, etc. This makes is super easy to quickly scan and share documents from WhatsApp without leaving the chat window, let alone the app.

Here’s how to do it.

How to scan documents with WhatsApp directly

Here’s how to quickly scan any kind of document from WhatsApp in seconds. You’d be forgiven for heading straight to the in-app camera, but that isn’t where the option is. It’s actually in the share menu. Let’s begin.

Step 1: Open the WhatsApp chat where you want to send the scanned document, and open the share menu. This is the menu from where you usually choose to send regular documents, live locations, etc.

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Step 2: Choose ‘Documents’ and you should see a new option called ‘Scan document’ on the next screen. Tap on the option to choose it.

Step 3: You will now see the camera open up with a slightly tweaked UI that is optimized for document scanning. Simply point the camera at the document you want to scan. WhatsApp will automatically detect the document, and crop and adjust it, allowing you to move to the next page (in case of multi-page documents).

Once all the pages are scanned, you can also tap on the preview of the last scanned page on the bottom-left to see all the pages and crop/adjust them if required. Here, you can also choose between filters like Colour, Greyscale, Black & White, and Photo. The Photo option is the one that sends the scan as is in the picture, without and extra effects to make the text more legible.

Once all adjustments for all pages are done, you can tap on the ‘Done’ button on the top left and WhatsApp will automatically convert the document into a pdf file and send it ahead. In case of multiple pages, all pages will be put in a single pdf file. Congratulations, you’ve now sent a document over WhatsApp, in perhaps the quickest and most efficient way possible.

Note that the document scanning feature on WhatsApp has just been rolled out, and not all smartphones (including Android phones and iPhones) would have received it at once. Like all updates, this one may need a few days to reach your device.