Webcam & document scan
Capture from your camera; optional contrast boost for scans.
This runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
About Webcam & document scan
Captures a still frame from your device camera straight into your browser, with an optional contrast boost for photographing documents, and saves it as a PNG without any upload.
Photographing a document is the everyday version of this: a signed form, a passport page, a utility bill, a receipt that needs to go into an expense claim. There are dozens of sites that will take a webcam frame for you, and they are the one category where “processed on our servers” means someone else had a live view of your camera and whatever you were holding up to it.
Start camera calls getUserMedia, the same browser API a video call uses, and requests the environment-facing camera — the rear one on a phone, whichever exists on a laptop. The stream is attached to the video element on this page and nothing else. Capture draws the current frame onto a canvas at the stream's native resolution and saves it as a PNG. The camera stops when you leave the page.
This is a frame grab, not a scanner app. There is no edge detection, no auto-crop, no perspective correction to square up a page shot at an angle, and no text recognition. The stream resolution is also usually lower than what your phone's own camera app produces. For a serious archival scan of an important document, the native camera app and a flat surface beat this.
How to use Webcam & document scan
- 1Click Start camera and allow the browser's camera permission prompt.
- 2Tick Document scan enhance if you are photographing text rather than a scene.
- 3Frame the subject in the video preview and click Capture.
- 4The PNG downloads and appears in the preview so you can check it.
What it won't do
- No auto-crop, edge detection or perspective correction.
- No camera picker, zoom, torch or resolution control.
- Captures at the stream's resolution, typically below your phone camera app's.
Common questions
Is my webcam video being uploaded anywhere?
No. The camera stream is attached to a video element inside this page, and the captured frame is read off it by a canvas in the same tab. Neither the live video nor the still is transmitted. You can verify it by opening your browser's network panel while you capture, or by disconnecting from the network first.
What does the document scan enhance option do?
It expands contrast around mid-grey by about 40 percent, which pushes off-white paper towards white and grey ink towards black. Text becomes considerably more readable and shadows across a page flatten out. It also clips: highlight and shadow detail at the extremes is thrown away, which is why you should leave it off for photographs.
Can I scan a multi-page document to PDF?
Capture each page as a separate PNG, then load all of them into the image-to-PDF tool, which puts one image per page in the order you select them. There is no text layer at any point in that process, so the resulting PDF is a set of pictures of pages and will not be searchable.
Why won't my camera start?
Three usual causes: the permission prompt was dismissed or previously denied for this site, another application is holding the camera open, or the page is not being served over HTTPS. Browsers block camera access on insecure origins entirely. Check the camera icon in your address bar to see and reset the site's permission.
Related tools
Why this one doesn't upload your file
There is no server to upload to. This page is a static file, and the work happens in your browser using the same graphics and WebAssembly code that renders every other site you visit. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed, and handed back as a download. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network entirely and it keeps working. The longer explanation