- Google Drive update brings big improvements to document scanning
- The app will be able to automatically reduce shadows, fix lighting, and more
- It’s rolling out to Android, but there’s no word on an iOS version
Google Drive is making a play to become one of the best document scanning apps around with its latest update, and it could help to make your scans crisp and clear like you always intended – all without you having to lift a finger.
Let’s face it, even when using one of the best Android phones, scanning documents can often feel hit or miss, with bad lighting and distracting shadows often conspiring to ruin your images. With this Google Drive update, that might hopefully become a thing of the past.
The update is coming to the Google Drive for Android app, as per a recent Google blog post. The article explains that Drive will be able to “digitize paper documents into higher quality images much faster.”
That’s because you’ll no longer need to spend ages fiddling with your Google Drive scans to make them clear and legible – instead, the app will handle all that for you.
Automatic enhancements
As Google explains, “Depending on the document, auto enhancement will perform actions like white balance correction, shadow removal, contrast enrichment, auto sharpening, light improvement, and more.”
That should help banish blemishes without you having to do much work at all. In comparison images on Google’s blog (at the top of this page), the company showed a heavily-shadowed receipt being corrected to crisp black and white using the process.
It’s the latest upgrade Google has added to Drive’s document scanning capabilities. The company recently added an option to add black and white filters to scanned images, as well as the ability to save scanned files as either PDFs or JPEGs. Yet the latest change sounds like it will be even more significant due to the amount of work it could save you.
The update isn’t available to all Android users just yet. Google says it’s coming to Google Workspace and personal accounts, starting with Rapid Release users, where the rollout should be complete by January 2, 2025.
It will then come to Scheduled Release users on January 6, 2025. There’s no word on when (or if) it will land on iOS. Still, once it’s fully rolled out, it might be able to put an end to poorly lit and overly shadowy scans once and for all.