Just aim and shoot – Your Chromebook camera will soon be able to scan documents
Although this update has been slow to arrive, it has yet to make an official appearance until today. On Chrome OS 96 Canary, my Pixelbook Go’s camera app displayed the message you see below, stating 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 in the frame. Scanning works best if the document and the background are different colors.
After opening the application itself, a new “Scan” option appears in the lower navigation next to the pre-existing “Video”, “Photo”, “Square” and “Portrait” options. Once you’ve skipped the tutorial message, all you need to do is point your Chromebook at the document, align the edges, and click the shutter button.
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You might have noticed that I said point your Chromebook at the document. Those of you with standard clamshell devices may be a little confused right now. Even if you had a rear-facing camera, how awkward would that be? This is why those with cameras facing the world will be the only ones who really benefit from this new functionality. This means that if you can remove your keyboard and have a tablet-style or detachable Chromebook, it will be possible for you.
Once you’ve placed a document in the camera frame, a blue bounding box will smartly fit around it, moving and moving to capture the edges appropriately. If you don’t do it correctly, a message will appear at the top reminding you to “color the lines”, so to speak. You may also notice that the QR code scanner is now integrated with the document scanner – they become one with a flick of the switch.
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Alright, great! You have now captured a document. At the bottom left, you’ll be presented with a âResumeâ option, just in case that doesn’t suit you. At the bottom right, you’ll see the âSave as Photoâ and âSave as PDFâ options, both of which drop the new document into your Files app. We don’t know yet when this needs to be deployed, but seeing it as usable and very well polished today means it can’t be far away.