Google has announced some new additions to improve the document scanning feature on Google Drive for Android. For starters, the feature has a touch of Google"s Material 3 design language to improve the user interface.
When you edit scanned documents, Google Drive now displays larger page previews that cover more screen real estate, allowing you to view more content. Various options and buttons to crop & rotate a document, add filters, or enhance the document using AI have moved up from the bottom of the screen to sit just below the page preview.
Google has improved the UI layout to make it easier to find the page deletion option or retake document images. Its thumbnail carousel, updated with Material 3, lets you quickly skim through your document and re-order pages by dragging and dropping them.
For the uninitiated, Google Drive for mobile devices has had the ability to scan physical documents for years. The feature received significant updates in 2023, when Google made it capable of recommending relevant title suggestions for scanned documents, capturing documents automatically, initializing scans faster, and importing from the camera roll.
To scan a document on the Google Drive app for Android, tap the camera button at the bottom right corner of the screen and point your camera at a physical document until a blue outline appears. You can scan documents, such as letters, receipts, and billing statements, and save them as searchable PDFs.
Google has started rolling out these new document scanner updates to all Workspace customers, individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts. The company stated that the rollout will take approximately two weeks to complete.
Google Drive has been recently updated with additional features. You can now use Gemini to move files into folders, analyze uploaded images from the side panel. You can also see thumbnail previews for video files and edit videos directly in your browser.