Remove blank pages, split one scan into separate documents at divider sheets, extract individual photos, and auto-rename files so a folder of scan_001.pdf becomes something you can search.
Scanning a stack of paper is the easy part. What comes out is one enormous PDF full of blank reverse sides, named scan_001.pdf, containing four separate documents and a dozen photographs. These five tools turn that raw output into an organised, searchable archive — mostly automatically.
Duplex scanning single-sided paper produces an empty page for every blank reverse, which can double your page count for no reason. Printing to PDF from documents with section breaks does it too, as do fax and multifunction devices that pad output to an even page count.
Remove Blank Pages detects and deletes them. It works on a content threshold rather than an exact test, because scans are never pure white — dust, speckle and paper texture all register. Do check the page count afterwards if your document uses deliberate “intentionally left blank” separators, which look identical to the accidental kind.
If you fed a stack of invoices through in one go, you now have one file containing all of them. The trick is to place a divider sheet between each document while scanning — then Auto Split finds those markers and cuts the file at each one, giving you a document per invoice.
Anything visually distinct works as a divider: a coloured sheet, a page with a large printed marker, or a barcode separator. The key is that dividers look clearly different from your real content.
No dividers in an existing scan? Then nothing can infer the boundaries. Use Split by Size if the documents are a uniform length, or the standard splitter to set break points by hand — and insert dividers next time.
Digitising a photo album usually means laying four or five prints on the flatbed at once. That produces one page containing several photographs, which is not what you want in an album.
Detect Photos finds each photo on the page, straightens it and crops it out as its own image. The auto-deskew step matters more than it sounds — even a degree or two of rotation from placing prints by hand is glaringly obvious once a photo is cropped to its edges.
For best results, leave clear gaps between prints and close the scanner lid so the background is uniform. Photos touching each other tend to be read as one.
A folder of scan_001 through scan_247 is effectively unsearchable — every document has to be opened to identify it.
Auto Rename reads the document's metadata title, or the most prominent heading on the first page, and names the file accordingly. A scanned invoice ends up named after the supplier and reference rather than a sequence number.
This depends on there being text to read, so run PDF OCR first on pure scans. That step also makes the whole archive searchable, which is worth doing regardless.
The opposite problem: some processes still ask for a “signed and scanned” copy, and a pristine digital export looks out of place beside genuine paperwork. Scanner Effect adds slight skew, light noise and an off-white background.
Subtlety is everything here — a degree or two of tilt and light grain read as authentic, while heavy noise looks obviously artificial. Real scans are cleaner than people assume. Note that the pages become images, so the text is no longer selectable and the file grows.
A raw batch scan is not an archive — it is one big file with blank pages, no boundaries and a meaningless name. Removing blanks, splitting at dividers, running OCR and auto-renaming turns it into something you can actually search years later, and it takes minutes rather than an afternoon.