Whether you are storing your documents locally or uploading them to the cloud, more and more people are wanting to password protect or encrypt their sensitive documents. There are ways to do this manually, but with the Fujitsu ScanSnap, it can be done automatically.
As usual, how you do it depends on the platform that you are using.
Windows
The Windows ScanSnap Manager software has the ability to password protect PDFs built right in, but the option is a bit hidden.
To do this, you can’t scan using the Quick Menu. You have to set up a ScanSnap Manager Profile. If you have no idea what the Quick Menu is or how to set up a Profile, I invite you to check out my Unofficial ScanSnap Setup Guide.
Once you are in your Profile, go to the File option tab and click on the Option… button.
In the window that pops up, there is a Password section. Check Set a password for PDF file.
When you scan using your ScanSnap, it will prompt you to enter a password.
If you want to use a fixed password for all documents scanned using this Profile, you can check Use a fixed password and enter your password in the Profile.
Once this is set up, any document you scan using this ScanSnap Manager Profile will be password protected.
Mac
Unfortunately, on the Mac things are not so simple. For whatever reason, the Mac ScanSnap Manager does not have password encryption built in.
One option is to use Automator which is built into the Mac. You can scan using your ScanSnap to a folder, and then use this awesome Automator action to highlight and encrypt the documents.
If you want things a bit more automated, I adapted the action to be a Folder Action instead of a Service. I created a folder called ToEncrypt and then told Automator to watch it.
If you’d like, you can download my Automator action here.
This works for me, but if anyone has any other clever options for automatically password protecting PDFs on the Mac, please drop them into the comments.
Do you password protect your scanned PDFs? How do you do it?
(Photo by Scott Schiller)