JotNot Scanner App Pro
Reviews and Complaints

I’ve been using this app, and I’m pretty sure a free version of it prior for years now. Along the way I’ve tried others because as much as I like this app I want to make sure there isn’t something I’m missing out on that I didn’t know of. Now I did find others that do a great job, they exist. But this is the app for me, it’s so smooth and fast to use. I had a meeting last month where I was discussing with a client needed changes in their systems and everyone was adding and discussing items. I took notes and contributed to the conversation. Right after the conversation ended while everyone was chatting about others things I quickly added the notes to a pdf and emailed it to everyone in the meeting. The CEO came over and asked if I would type him up a copy of my notes because he saw me taking pictures of them. I notified him that I had just emailed them to him. A few seconds later he was blown away looking at the notes on his phone. He thinks I’m a magician or something because it looks like a perfect scan which phones could never do because it always comes out skewed. Thanks to this app I can quickly do amazing scans that impress my clients and helps me maintain my professional edge.

If only the people at JotNot and ScannerPro go together and made the best parts of their apps in one product.
First the good:
Jot Not's quick scan method is easy. The "corners" method is quick to use and manipulate the corners.
Scans and image processing are good and of course can always use improvement. They're at a solid 8 out of 10 I'd say. Good but not "GREAT"!
Overall, app does what it says.

The bad:
Ease of use is lacking.
There should be one easy place to know why you're forwarding to Evernote, Google Docs, Dropbox, and a way to quickly change the name of the doc you're sending from the same place.
Can't currently tell as there is no confirmation of what exactly your sending. Example: You scan in a bunch of pages as part of the same document. When you're viewing the last page, and click the "send to" button at bottom. You've only sent the last page, and there is NO CONFIRMATION, NO WAY OF KNOWING WHAT YOU JUST SENT OR IF IT IS CONFIRMED BEFORE YOU FEEL FREE TO DELETE IT.

Good app, Needs major improvements in ease of use and giving the user details ( send docs "organize "page? ) in an easily accessible way. Also camera is a bit buggy sometimes.
Use it daily. 6 out of 10. Can't wait to see improvements.

Jot not made me mad. A divorce (not Jot Notes fault) forced me in a new iTunes account and my JN account was under my ex's apple ID. I needed to backup my files but had to do some one by one nonsense because I couldn't upgrade my app. Also not Jot fault. But the was a hassle! I downloaded all if the 5 star popular apps and nothing compared. jT allows you to customize so many settings like fax sheets, file prefixes etc. Renaming files is tedious on the iPhone. It's as painless as possible. The document adjustments are quick and render the best quality. The ease of faxing is a plus too. I need to fax about 4 times a year and love I can do it inside the app without hopping on a new one and recalling how to use it. Maybe I'm just comfortable with it, but I like it the best. Text recognition and specific folder favorites from inside cloud drives would be a plus. Also not sure why iCloud doc folders are left out of options in all of these apps. I'll blame Apple for that. Also some updated bright pretty colors would be nice. Perhaps theme choices since none offer this. Anyway...

The recent divorce proceedings with the wing nut were slightly easier because of this app. They deserve more than 35 ratings in the app store and they deserve 5 stars and you both deserve a try together.

I have used this app for about one year now, and it has become my reliable partner in paperless record keeping. With the iPhone 4S, it's even more impressive than with my earlier phones.

I had never used the fax function until this afternoon. A vacationing family member forgot to print out his room reservation confirmation, and asked if I could fax it to the resort if he forwarded the info to me via email, so it would be there upon his arrival. Why not?

I received the email, made screen captures of the document (scroll to display what you wish to capture, and press the home and top buttons at once), and pointed JotNot to my camera roll. The entire document made three pages, and JotNot automagically trimmed off the distracting header and footer fields from my email client leaving perfect document pages to send on their way.

I typed a few notes on the cover page, agreed to the in app charge of .99 for up to five pages, and pressed the go button. Perfect!

A follow up call confirmed that the fax arrived, and that there were no quality issues at the receiving end. I am duly impressed. The entire transaction took only a few minutes while I was talking on the phone confirming that I received the email document to fax!

JotNot Pro is a foundation app for anyone who uses their iPhone as a mobile office. I love it.

Works as described - I was making multiple-page PDFs of tax documents the day I downloaded it, and they look great (a bit better than they did from our scanner, actually, and the app is much quicker). Pushing to dropbox and emailing files (PDF and jpg) work perfectly - the scanning software that came with our latest printer/scanner is awful, and this app just replaced it.

I've tried Jot Not's fax app with no luck (and the loss of a few dollars for failed attempts), but have never tried it within this particular app so can't vouch for that feature. Just make sure you can verify the fax sent successfully, and I wouldn't buy many credits until it's proven to be functional. But LOVE the scanning/storage aspects, and sending to outside storage services has always worked perfectly for me.

One feature that is lacking, given it's a paid app, is iCloud backup/sync. After switching iPhones a few times (I prefer to start clean rather than restore new phones from backups, and now backup to the cloud rather than my computer anyway.), I've switched to Scanner Pro solely for the iCloud backup feature because I was tired of losing the in-app file library. (Everything was saved to Dropbox/Evernote/email, but the easy, in-one-place access and tags were lost.) I prefer Jot Not's software and file system/tags to Scanner Pro's, and would be thrilled to switch back if/when iCloud backup is utilized!

JotNot is, in principle, a wonderful app. I use it all the time. Being able to use your phone for scanning things for work or for making copies of documents at home is terrific. I have recommended this app to many friends in the past. It is one of the apps I rated as "invaluable" for my iPhone. The latest update, however, has taken the app from indispensable and easy to use to necessary but a real pain to use. Who thought that having the final "scanned" area be larger than what actually appears on your phone screen when you're taking the picture was a good idea? I thought the whole point of taking a careful picture was that what you see in the picture is what you get on the scanned page. Now I have to readjust the page size every time for every the page. And the rearrangement of the location for the back and process buttons means that when I'm doing that I often end up going back or processing before I am ready. I'm not saying it was perfect before, but it was certainly better than the update has made it. I used to look forward to using JotNot. Now I somewhat dread the process. I still use it, because the principal is wonderful, but I hate that an update has made it worse than before. I hope the developers read these reviews and change their bad ideas at least back to what they were. I still recommend this app, but with qualifications. I hope I can recommend it more strongly again in the future.

4 basic programs I keep on iPhone tool bar. I use it at least once a day every day. It makes my iPhone like a scanner. I have used it to record documents from larger architectural drawings or pieces of them, say about
Letter size to smaller documents - all crystal clear. I have copied letters when time is of the essence and emailed to attorneys which were then used as official docs in a court case. I have used JNP for recording felt tipped notes that were on a shiny metal surface. The learning curve is big here, and if you are not patient and willing to experiment, then this program is not for you. I have created great repros. with my iPhone which cannot be done with camera alone. You just have to take the time to learn it. You can take a shot and turn it into a PDF, tiff, or jpeg then it gives you the choice of email, or sending to any of the cloud services. This is a must have for anyone who is a professional communicator. TIP The lighting that you use is very important. I find indirect daylight gives the best result. I use low contrast, and all buttons "off" below the "contrast" slider, and "less whitening" off. This captures 90% of my takes which are newsprint and mags. Also my wife is a teacher. When it becomes a problem with copy machines at school, for they are always breaking down, she uses JNP to capture what she would normally copy, then email the jpeg or PDF to her room's computer/printer and print as many copies as she would like.

I use this app all the time, primarily for whiteboard capture. It does a great job removing background artifacts, so you get a clean and easy to read image. You can share the scan with email or one of several "sync" solutions, like Dropbox. (I say "sync" because it's not automatically uploaded after you scan, you have to manually do it via the "share" icon, but it's only one or two taps.)

I like the new 4.0 update, it's a lot cleaner design and I really like the new dark/light controls. The developer took away some of the configuration options (or at least I haven't discovered where it moved to) when you're capturing a scan, but honestly there was always too much complexity in there before. I only ever tweaked the defaults to change the amount of background reduction, and the new dark/light controls do this much better and more intuitively.

To the reviewers complaining about lack of color: all you have to do is change the processing mode to "Whiteboard". After you snap the photo and set the corners, tap on the bottom of the screen, below the dark/light adjustment controls. The default mode is "Document", if you want color, choose "Whiteboard". Works great.

NOTE: there is a bug with converting scans from the previous version's format, it sets the date to the conversion date instead of the original scan date. I emailed the dev and he wrote back immediately saying it would be fixed in the next version. So I'm not taking away a star for that -- good support!

I use this app on my iPad for two purposes. The first is to get a .PDF image of a document in a pinch when I'm at a client site or if I'm doing research at the library. It's much cheaper to use this app to scan a page from a book than it is to use the photocopier.

The other use I have for this app has become the thing I like the most about it. I like to use my iPad in the kitchen to display recipes because it's smaller and lighter than a book and because there's no issue with cracking the spine when I use the iPad. JotNot is an excellent way to scan a page from a cookbook into the iPad. We have a flatbed scanner as part of a multifunction photo printer, and I'm sure I could probably get a crisper, more professional scan using that, but JotNot is a heck of a lot easier and faster.

I've given four stars instead of five for two reasons. The first is that the image can be a bit grainy at times and the process of cropping down the image can be a little irritating. The second is that the app can be very finicky about whether I'm holding the iPad still enough to take the picture (I suppose this is probably a good thing, as it reduces blurred images, but for some reason it annoys me). These are both minor issues, however, because the key is to recognize that this app's primary purpose is for convenience and scanning in a pinch. If you have a long document or if you need a professional-looking scan, you'll take the time to use a desktop scanner or flatbed. For single-page usage, this app is very good.

I bought this app just 20 mins ago and I LOVE it! Wife and I both have iPhone 3GS w/iOS4; app will probably be even better on iPhone4. Note: I don't know the developer in any way and I'm not getting anything for this review. We are just that happy with this product. Don't waste your time/money with any other scanner apps if you need to scan travel receipts for work, or compile multiple page scans of whiteboards, etc.. You can import "scans" (okay ... they're just pics) from your photo library or you can take them from within the app. You can create/compile multiple pages into one compilation for a business trip. It auto-detects edges or you can manually adjust keystoning/cropping. Previous review comment about "too white" scared me, but in there's a "less white" option in Settings. I understand why the bright white is default and trust it will work especially great on those hard-to-read, poor contrast receipts that would normally photocopy poorly and need playing with copier settings to improve the scan readability (you know what I'm talking about ... like fuel receipts from gas stations). You can manually adjust contrast. There are multiple presets to optimize image quality/color settings, such as Whiteboard, Black and White, Receipts, Photographs, etc.. E-mail compilations as a PDF, JPG, and PNG. Plus integration with Google Docs, Dropbox, MobileMe, others. I showed this app to my wife and she said to put it on her iPhone right away (since we both travel for work). Thanks again for a great app and keep up the great work!

Edit v1.1---------------After downloading v1.1, I feel it only right to edit my previous review and bump my rating up from 3 stars to 5 stars. Every one of my previous comments was addressed in this release. Top notch product now. And quite a bargain at the current 99-cent price. Any criticism left now is for the iPhone's camera (stability), not the app. Well done! If you have such a need, you'd be crazy not to jump on 99 cents.v1.0---------------------5 stars from 7 reviewers... really... developers/friends/family, please stop hyping up your own product. I give it 3 stars because they're off to a good start. It's far from the miracle they'd like you to believe it is. The interface is nice enough, but two gripes. First, you can't zoom the processed image in the app, so you're forced to save/exit/open photo app/zoom/delete/exit photo app/launch Jotnot/start over. Would be nice to zoom the image in the app to see if it's actually legible before saving. Then second, why bother saving the original? Just makes me have to go clear out my photo app later. Why would I bother using your app if I wanted the original? And if you take several shots from within the app, and then delete them before finding a 'keeper' (and it will take several attempts), all of those originals are in your photo app. Kind of messy.From a processing perspective, it would be nice if there were a "black and white" only mode for receipts. And maybe a contrast setting/slider to help make the receipts more legible. I'm constantly getting yellow shadows and alias artifacts around the text in my receipts (and therefore washed out text) because it's introducing color where there isn't any.Like I said, good start. I'm into it now for 4 bucks, so I look forward to future development.

Update 4: still using this great app and that's saying a lot but dropped four stars to three because I think they are behind the times on some features.

Would like to see a way to somehow create iOS reminders out of captured notes.

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update 3: this remains a best-of-breed app but i wanted to bring to light a recent issue whereby the app started crashing upon startup due to what is likely a corrupt or somehow incorrect snapshot/scan. what i had to do - under the direction of support - was to extract the saved images from the app using a freeware app via my mac and then delete and reinstall the app. this is annoying to say the least and i do hope we dont have many more of these problems.

i consider this issue a one off but feel that i should mention it. still an excellent app.

update 2: this app still continues to be central to my workflow and Evernote entries (via the slick API) seems to be working even better.

strangely, though, I seem to be getting memory warnings from the start every time I use it but they rarely end with a crash. it can still be annoying.

that said, most users will really like the scan and process on the go.

I also use it to reduce the file size of photos taken with the iPhone as they tend to be huge and I don't always need full resolution and quality.

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update: evernote upload is now much improved and has hung only once. very convenient.

multipage support is also highly useful now whereas in the past each photo would be a separate document.

I'm still trying to figure out how to make the most out of presets and custom options and I hope the developers pay attention to this.

finally, I'd really like to see one-click image rotation built in as I frequently snap sideways.

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evernote upload is unreliable and frequently hangs with no way to recover lost file and notes when restarting jotnot.

otherwise the app works pretty well but needs more thought and customizability.

This is a brief comparison between JotNot and DocScanner Apps:Both claim to do similar things: photograph a document and then email it to you as a PDF file. And, indeed, both do that.But there is a huge difference between the applications: (In summary: DocScanner is in every way a superior application.)• JotNot file sizes averaged 4.5 times larger, without any increase in document quality.• JotNot does NOT have the ability to scan and send multi-page documents, while DocScanner handles multipage documents.• JotNot did NOT auto-detect the document edges while DocScanner reliably detected the edges of documents.• JotNot document quality was consistently WORSE than DocScanner under all tested conditions.• JotNot did not have the ability to normalize document sizes into standard paper sizes, such as Letter, A4, etc. DocScanner auto-detected paper sizes and coerced the image to fit. This is important when printing out documents or when storing them in a document management system later on.DocScanner costs more than JotNot, so if the $5 difference is important, it is the one reason to choose JotNot: Pay less and get much less.This is not to say that DocScanner is without its flaws. Some of them include:• DocScanner doesn’t remember brightness and contrast settings from one page to the next of the same document. So it is difficult to get a consistent look between pages.• Neither application seems to understand that some documents have no grayscale, and so the quality can be enhanced by using a threshold level to get rid of background “tone” and enhancing and smoothing the images. This is basic document scanning technology in other types of devices (like fax machines.)• You must decide in advance that you want to compose a “document.” You can’t scan one page and then keep “adding” pages. It’s a little non-obvious that “Camera” is for one page and that you create a “Document” and then add photos for multi-page. So the UI is a little un-intuitive.The quality of documents under either application is marginal. It’s better than a poor quality fax (standard resolution) machine, and never as god as a fine-resolution fax machine. At best, the quality is barely at the level that a bank or governmental agency might accept. This is a serious limitation.The quality could be improved in several ways, with good image processing. Multiple photos, or a brief video would allow sub-pixel interpolation, which would increase the resolution. Taking multiple photos of the same document would also allow sub-pixel resolution, enhancing image quality. But neither of these applications is that advanced.In summary: Don’t expect better than a low-quality fax machine. But having a document scanner can nonetheless be extremely handy when traveling. There is room for improvement in the image quality.

For the love of god please fix the “scanning is unavailable while multitasking” error message that pops up every time the scan button is tapped.

I used to love this app - it scanned so easily and was super user friendly. Latest update made it a thousand times harder to use and navigate. GIVE ME BACK MY EASH SCANNER

PLEASE change the app back to previous version. My business depends on this App and the new UI and flow is TERRIBLE. I’ve been a loyal user since 2013, please fix this and roll back the version update ASAP!

This used to be one of my go to apps and I’ve recommended it to tons of people over the years. Now I can’t use it anymore and will need to find a new doc app. Super disappointing. It was so user friendly and smart. Now it’s unusable. Please fix?

This used to be a 4 star app.
The recent update made it confusing and the quality is now terrible. I will now be using apple notes to scan pdfs. It is not the best but much better than this. Please fix the problems so I can go back to using it!

What did you do in the update? I loved this app so much and used it multiple times a day. Now every time I scan a document every page is blurry? I don’t want to have to look for a different app and also paid to buy this. PLEASE change it back!

I had been using this app for years. When I tried it again last week, I noticed the app was updated. All of the features are horrendous now; you can’t easily crop pages anymore, and there’s no telling if you’re capturing just what you want or also the background.

Downloading another scanning app.

After yesterday’s update I must place documents on the floor to get far enough away to capture, the documents are rotated 90 degrees, moving the camera up and down shifts the document left to right on screen and left to right movement moves document up and down... wow!

I have used this great app for several years. I am hopeful the latest update will be fixed promptly.

With the update it’s impossible to select the correct part of a page una multiple page scan. Absurd.
If you are scanning a multiple page document, you used to be able to select the relevant part and resize each and every one of the pages you were scanning.
Now you are only able to resize the last page of the scan. Which makes the app useless for scanning a document with more than one page.

The app does what it’s supposed to do but former versions of JotNot behaved better - this version has a harder time handling mixed light situations - like sitting in the cab of a vehicle with various shadows and light present – the old version was fantastic at balancing and grabbing the image for a PDF conversion, this one performs mediocre. This one also automatically populates the body of a message with the URL for where to get the app - annoying. Every time I send an email with this I have to bother deleting that string of text.
I’m sure there are improved features in this app over previous versions - I don’t use them - it seems to have come at a cost.