The document scanner in Google Drive receives its biggest update yet! Several features will make your work easier

Have you ever tried scanning papers with your phone? If you don’t have a printer with a scanner at home, it’s a great thing, but in principle, it’s still incredibly annoying. You focus on one page, then another, some shots come out blurry, and you still have to manually sort the result. These are precisely the little things Google now wants to eliminate. The scanner built into the Google Drive app for Android is getting its biggest update yet, which will turn your mobile phone into a fast scanning station. The arrival of the new feature was confirmed by Sameer Samat, President of the Android Ecosystem division, in a short video on X.

Scan seamlessly, your phone handles the sharpness

The main new feature is Smart Batch Scanning mode. Instead of taking photos page by page, you simply move your phone over the spread-out documents as if you were shooting a video. Previews of individual sheets immediately appear at the bottom of the screen, and the system automatically divides them into separate documents. This saves a lot of time for longer contracts or piles of receipts.

Scanning documents from a phone is a pain!

Glad to see the new document scanning experience in Google Drive on Android is rolling out now.

📄 Smart Batch Scanning: Scan multiple pages at once, automatically splits them into separate docs.
🚫 Duplicate Detection: Hovering… pic.twitter.com/Uqh2Zf2NMY

— Sameer Samat (@ssamat) May 29, 2026

Two other features ensure the quality of the result. Auto-Best Frame recognizes a blurry shot and automatically replaces it with the sharpest available capture, so you don’t have to rescan the page due to a shaky hand. Duplicate Detection, on the other hand, identifies a sheet you’ve already captured and skips it, so you don’t end up with multiple copies of the same page.

The appearance has also been updated. The viewfinder now uses the Material 3 Expressive design language, and the old beaker icon in the upper right corner has disappeared, making the interface cleaner. If automatic capture is inconvenient for you, you can turn it off with the pause button, and you can also add photos you took earlier via the system file picker.

Everything runs directly on the phone. And there’s a catch

The entire scanner is powered by Google Play services, which means the new features can be found not only in Drive but also in the Files by Google app. According to Google, all processing takes place directly on the device, which offers three advantages: fast response independent of connection, offline functionality, and increased privacy, because documents do not leave the phone during scanning. Some users have had these features available in beta for several months.

On-device computations are responsible for the only limitation. The scanner in this form only runs on phones with at least 8 GB of RAM, so owners of cheaper and older models are out of luck.

Would you use batch document scanning on your phone?

Sources: @ssamat/X, Android Authority