Update April 5, 2011: ScanDrop has made some changes, including a Mac version. Read about the ScanDrop cloud scanning updates here.
The folks at OfficeDrop (formerly Pixily) are usually known for their scanning and online document management service, but they’ve just released a cool new application called ScanDrop which allows you to use almost any scanner to scan directly to Google Docs.
ScanDrop is a Windows-only (boo!) application that interfaces with Google Docs, which (in case you don’t know) now allows you to store PDFs and other documents. It takes the images that you scan into ScanDrop and uploads them as a PDF.
If you have a TWAIN scanner, it will do the scanning and uploading for you. If you have a Fujitsu ScanSnap, you need to set up a Profile and scan it to JPG (weirdly) and set the target application as ScanDrop. There are instructions on the site.
I tested it out and it worked pretty well. It works with Google Apps too, not just “normal” Google Docs.
Here’s a video by OfficeDrop that shows how it works.
The ScanDrop beta is free, but they’re apparently going to be releasing a paid version that will OCR the document to make it searchable by Google Docs, do automatic blank page deletion, and document splitting.
(Sounds like they should just take the OCR’ed PDF that the ScanSnap can generate and just use that rather than make you scan it to JPG, but maybe there is some technical reason for this).
ScanDrop aside, would you use Google Docs to store your documents? You can sign up for the ScanDrop beta here.
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Brooks, thank you for reviewing our ScanDrop product. I'm sorry that we don't have a Mac version yet – I will let you know as soon as it is ready!
Regarding your question on why we scan to JPEGs and not any other file format: We approach everything from an efficiency point of view. (Remember that we are scanning boxes and boxes and boxes of paper each month at our facility, so little things add up pretty quickly.) JPEGs are a very easy and fast to manipulate file type, so it makes rotation and zoom more efficient. But I can understand why you find it odd!
Sincerely,
Healy Jones
Head of Marketing
OfficeDrop
Makes sense Healy, thanks for dropping in!
Cool enough. I don't use Google Docs, have been using DocQ.com Onramp to scan and edit/ manipulate PDF's . Pretty awesome too.