Fujitsu yesterday announced new capabilities added to its ScanSnap Cloud feature for iX series ScanSnap scanners. Most notably, it introduced a new app for iOS and Android that includes the ability to scan using your phone’s camera and new OCR capabilities for making scanned PDFs searchable.

As I wrote here last year, ScanSnap cloud is a feature that allows scanning directly to popular cloud services, without the need for a computer or mobile device. The feature works with either the ScanSnap iX500 desktop scanner or the iX100 portable scanner and is free for users of either model.

It allows scanning directly from the scanner to several cloud services, including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Expensify, GoogleDrive, Google Photos, Hubdoc, LedgerDocs, OneDrive, Rocket Matter, Shoeboxed and Talk Acct. With yesterday’s announcement, two other services were added, Concur Expense and QuickBooks Online.

In addition, ScanSnap Cloud can be configured to send different types of scans to different cloud services. It automatically recognizes four types of scans – documents, receipts, business cards and photos — and can be configured to send each different type to a different service. Maybe you want scanned photos to go to Google Photos, scanned business cards to go to Evernote, and scanned receipts to Google Drive.

The new app lets you scan using your phone’s camera, without needing either the iX500 or the iX100. It retains the ability to send different types of scans to different services. Just hold your phone over the document and the app automatically positions it and makes the scan. Whereas ScanSnap Cloud using a scanner recognizes the type of document automatically, the app uses a slider to let you select the type of document.

From the app, you can also manage all of your ScanSnap Cloud scans, whether scanned from the app or the device.

Yesterday’s announcement also added OCR capabilities of up to 500 pages per month, enabling users to create searchable PDFs of scanned documents.

I used the app to make several scans of documents, business cards and photographs. The quality of the scans was quite good and the ease of use was comparable to my favorite phone scanner, Evernote’s Scannable.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.