ABOUT
About LensUp
LensUp is a set of browser-based tools for turning phone photos of paper into clean, printable documents. It is maintained by the LensUp team at Springtide Labs LLC, a Delaware company. Every tool is free, needs no account, and adds no watermark.
What LensUp does
Most people photograph a document long before they ever think about scanning one. The photo is crooked, one corner is in shadow, the file is 6 MB, and the form that needs it accepts a 200 KB PDF. LensUp exists for that gap. It takes the photos you already have and produces the file the other side asked for.
The current tools cover six jobs: turning one or more photos into a single PDF, correcting perspective so a page photographed at an angle comes out rectangular, removing the shadow your own hand casts across the paper, erasing coloured pen marks from a form, laying both sides of an ID card onto one sheet at true physical size, and compressing a PDF or image toward a target file size. A separate passport-photo tool prepares portrait images against the dimensions published by the authority you are applying to.
Why everything runs in your browser
The documents people scan are the sensitive ones: identity cards, bank statements, medical forms, exam paperwork, tenancy agreements. A conventional online converter uploads that file to a server, processes it there, and hands back a download link. That is a reasonable engineering choice and a poor privacy one, because it puts a copy of your document on someone else’s disk.
LensUp is built the other way round. Image decoding, perspective correction, filtering, compression and PDF assembly all happen inside your browser tab, using the Canvas API for pixel work, WebAssembly for the heavier codecs, and Mozilla’s pdf.js for reading existing PDFs. Your file never leaves the device. This is not a promise about how carefully we run a server; there is no server in the path to be careful about.
The trade-off is honest and worth stating. Everything is bounded by your device: a very large PDF on an old phone is slower than it would be on a data centre GPU, and a browser with JavaScript disabled cannot run the tools at all. We think that is the right price for keeping the document on your side of the network.
What the tools cannot do
Being specific about limits is more useful than a feature list.
- Compression is best effort, not a guarantee. When you ask for 50 KB, LensUp reduces quality and, if needed, resolution, and returns the smallest file it could produce. Extremely small targets on a detailed page may be unreachable; the tool says so rather than pretending it succeeded.
- Existing PDFs are rasterised. When you open a PDF, its pages are rendered locally into images. The exported file therefore has no selectable text, no form fields, no clickable links and no vector content. If you need those preserved, LensUp is the wrong tool.
- Geometry is manual. There is no automatic edge detector. You place the four corners yourself in the editor. We removed automatic detection after it cropped real documents incorrectly; a tool that quietly destroys a page is worse than one that asks for a tap.
- We cannot validate an official requirement. LensUp can hit a file size and a pixel dimension. Whether the resulting photo satisfies a particular portal’s rules on background, expression, or recency is between you and that portal.
How the guidance pages are written
Alongside the tools, LensUp publishes task pages that explain how to meet a specific upload requirement. Those pages follow one rule: a stated requirement must come from the authority that set it, be linked, and carry the date we checked it. The pages that reference Indian recruitment portals, for example, cite the relevant Reserve Bank of India, Staff Selection Commission and Institute of Banking Personnel Selection notices directly, with the date of the version we read.
We do this because official limits change between recruitment cycles, and a confident number with no source is how a stale figure survives for years. Where a rule is likely to shift, the page says so and tells you to check the current notice before uploading. We separate what the tool does from what an external body requires, and we do not present the second as if it were the first.
Languages
The interface and the task pages are available in twenty languages. Translations are reviewed by speakers of each language against what the tool actually does, not machine-produced from the English and shipped. When a capability description turned out to overstate the product in a particular language, we corrected the translation rather than the claim.
How LensUp is funded
The tools are free and carry no account, no upsell and no watermark. Running costs are covered by advertising. Advertising has no access to your documents, which are processed on your device and never uploaded; what advertising can and cannot collect is set out in full in our Privacy Policy.
Corrections and contact
If a page states a requirement that has since changed, if a tool produces a wrong result, or if a translation misdescribes what a feature does, we want to hear about it. Email write@lensup.ai — see Contact for what to include, and please do not send identity documents. Corrections to a factual claim are made on the page itself, and the page’s updated date changes with them.