Just point and shoot – Your Chromebook camera will soon be able to scan documents

While this update has been a long time coming, it’s yet to make an official appearance until today. On Chrome OS 96 Canary, the camera app on my Pixelbook Go displayed the message you see below, indicating that instead of having to scan through the traditional built-in ‘Scan’ app, I could technically capture a document directly.

Scan your document

Place all edges of the document within the frame. Scanning works best if the document and background are different colors.

After opening the app itself, a new ‘Scan’ option appears on the bottom navigation alongside the pre-existent ‘Video’, ‘Photo’, ‘Square’, and ‘Portrait’ options. Once you dismiss the tutorial message, all you’ll need to do is point your Chromebook at the document, line up the edges and snap the shutter button.

You may have noticed I said to point your Chromebook at the document. Those of you with standard clamshell devices may be a bit confused right now. Even if you had a rear-facing camera, how awkward would that be to do? That’s why those with world-facing cameras will be the only ones to truly benefit from this new feature. That means that if you can flip your keyboard out of the way and have a tablet-style or detachable Chromebook, this will be possible for you.

Once you place a document in the frame of the camera, a blue bounding box will intelligently adjust around it, moving and shifting to appropriately capture the edges. If you aren’t doing it right, a message will appear at the top reminding you to ‘color in the lines’, so to speak. You may also notice that the QR Code scanner is now built-in to the document scanner – they’re one in the same with a simple flip of the switch.

Alright, great! You’ve now captured a document. On the bottom-left, you’ll be presented with a ‘Retake’ option, just in case it wasn’t to your liking. On the bottom-right, you’ll see ‘Save as Photo’ and ‘Save as PDF’ options, both of which drop the new document into your Files app. We’re not yet sure when this is due to roll out, but seeing it appear as usable and very well polished today means it can’t be far off.