Google Drive is rolling out an updated document scanner UI with better iconography

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Last year, Google spent much of its time and energy adopting its new Material Theme design for the majority of its Android apps. Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Keep, Google Home, Google Play Store were among the apps that received a visual and functional overhaul. The design language makes heavy use of wide spacing between visual elements, cleaner and flatter icons, and the rounder Google Sans font. In a lot of apps like Photos and Google Camera, Google also revamped the feature shortcuts and brought them closer to the bottom to improve single-handed usage. Now, Google Drive’s document scanner feature has received a similar design change with updated iconography.

Almost a year after Google Drive apps were retouched with the Material Theme design, the new document scanner UI gets more elaborated with additional shortcuts. We first found out about Google’s test of the new scanner UI in Google Drive back in December last year.

The new interface has four buttons in the bottom row. Starting from the left, the first button takes you back to the camera for rescanning documents or adjusting the grid. The second button from the left allows you to choose between the different color modes such as B&W, Color, and Color Drawing. Using the third option, you can rotate the image while the fourth one lets you crop it. The button below this row of icons lets you add more pages to the scanned document and after you add more than one image, you see an extra button in the row for dismissing the current image.

The ellipsis, ie. the three-dot button on the top right, opens up menu options. Here you can change the settings like the page size, image quality, and the paper orientation for the PDF that is created with the collection of scanned pages.

The new scanner UI in Google Drive is available to all users and appears to be a server-side switch. To start using the UI, just tap on the “+” icon within Google Drive and then on Scan.