There are manyfantastic document scanner apps for Androidwhich instantly convert a series of photos into PDF files, sometimes featuring optical character recognition (OCR) and page edge detection. Google Drive, which comes pre-installed on most Android devices, has a document scanner built-in, but we may not remember to use it in the heat of the moment, instead resorting to snapping a quick photo using the camera app. Google Photos smartlyidentifies images of documentsfrom your camera roll and categorizes them separately, but the process is automated, and hence prone to errors. However, it appears manual recategorization support may be in the works.
How to scan documents on your Android phone or tablet
Your phone is more than capable, and we’ve got the best app for the job
Despite how easy to use document scanners have become, snapping photos of important receipts, documents, IDs, etc. is commonplace, especially when you’re in a hurry. Google Photos uses AI and machine learning smarts to take images from your camera roll and place them in a dedicatedDocumentssubsection of theSearchtab. The category has been around since 2021, and is further divided into Screenshots, Books & magazines, Event information, Identity, Notes, Payment methods, Receipts, Recipes & menus, etc. The benefits are compounded by the search feature in the app, which enables looking up specific images by their content.
However, the automatic categorization can be incorrect in some cases, misidentifying a menu for a receipt, for instance. Such false positives don’t help the user and even cast Google’s algorithm in a poor light, but support for manual correction and recategorization could help matters. The popular Google app feature spotter@AssembleDebug on X(formerly Twitter) found strings of code in Google Photos suggesting you could manually recategorize images if the AI didn’t file them in the correct folder.
Change categories
Categories
AssembleDebug notes that once the feature rolls out, you can select the incorrectly categorized images, tap the three-dot overflow menu in the top right corner, and choose theChange Categoriesoption. For now, recategorization isn’t possible in the Photos app, because the feature is still in development. Google isn’t usually transparent with timelines, so there’s no telling when we may see it roll out, either.
On the bright side, manual correction can be used as input for machine learning models, helping Google’s auto-categorization improve just the way voice typing systems identify manual corrections and enhance speech models if some corrections are frequent.
