Your house is gone. Fire, flood, whatever it was. You now need to prove who you are, prove you own things, and file a claim. Every piece of paper that would do that was in the house. That's the case for digital copies, and it's why this is worth twenty minutes on a Tuesday. The tool: Genius Scan. Free on both platforms. You point your phone at a document, it finds the edges, corrects the angle, cleans up shadows, and gives you a PDF rather than a photo. How To Download: The application is entirely free and available for iOS and Android devices : - Download on the Apple App Store - Download on Google Play Why a PDF matters: it's the format that gets accepted. Multi-page documents stay together as one file, text stays sharp, and you can print it or email it and it looks like a document instead of a picture of one. Three things about how it handles your files that matter for this use. Everything processes on your device. Nothing goes to their servers. Scans stay inside the app. They don't land in your camera roll, which means they aren't auto-syncing to iCloud or Google Photos and they aren't in the library when you hand somebody your phone to show them a picture. And you can lock it. The paid tier adds Face ID and passcode protection on the app itself, plus password encryption on exported PDFs. If you're scanning Social Security cards and birth certificates, that's a few dollars well spent. What to scan. Identity: birth certificates, Social Security cards, passports, driver's licenses, immigration documents. Ownership: deeds, titles, mortgage or lease, vehicle registration. Financial: insurance policies with policy numbers, bank account details, recent statements. Medical: prescriptions, allergies, vaccination records, anything about ongoing conditions. Legal: wills, power of attorney, custody or guardianship orders, marriage and divorce decrees.