How to Switch from Microsoft Lens to ScanWow (2026 Migration Guide)

Microsoft Lens is fully retired. Your existing scans are still in OneDrive, but the app itself no longer works. This guide walks through everything: how to retrieve your old scans, how to bring them into ScanWow, and how to rebuild a scanning workflow that is faster than Lens was.

Before you start: understanding what you have

When you used Microsoft Lens, it saved your scans in one of a few places depending on how you configured it:

• OneDrive — most users had scans go here automatically, usually in a folder called "Documents Scanned" or a custom folder.
• OneNote — if you scanned directly into notes, they live in your OneNote notebooks.
• Photos — if you exported as image, some scans may be in your iPhone's Photos library.

The good news: your OneDrive files are not deleted. Microsoft retired the scanning app, not the storage. You still have access to everything you previously scanned as long as you can log in to your Microsoft account through OneDrive or the web.

Step-by-step migration

What to expect when you switch

The camera flow is familiar

The core action — point, shoot, crop, export — is the same rhythm as Lens. The main difference is that ScanWow's auto-crop tends to be more accurate on documents that are not perfectly flat or evenly lit, so you will adjust less often.

OCR is meaningfully better

If you ever used Lens to extract text and found yourself fixing errors afterward, ScanWow's AI OCR in 17 languages should be a noticeable improvement. It handles mixed-language documents, handwriting, and lower-contrast pages better than Lens did. The extracted text is searchable directly inside the app.

No OneDrive dependency

One of the most common frustrations with Lens was that it was deeply tied to OneDrive. If you did not use Microsoft 365 heavily, the integration felt like overhead. ScanWow's iCloud backup keeps everything in Apple's ecosystem. If you prefer to keep scans local only, you can do that too — ScanWow does not require any cloud service.

Siri and Shortcuts

ScanWow supports Siri and Apple Shortcuts. You can set up a shortcut to open the scanner directly — useful if you scan frequently and want to shave a few taps. Lens never had Shortcuts support.

Handling edge cases

Scans stored in OneNote, not OneDrive

If you scanned directly into OneNote notebooks, the process is slightly different. Open OneNote, find the note containing the scan, and export or copy the image. You can then import that image into ScanWow using the Photos import — ScanWow will treat it like any imported image and let you export it as a PDF.

Large archives

If you have a large library of old Lens scans — hundreds of PDFs — the most practical approach is to download them in batches to iCloud Drive first, then import the important ones into ScanWow. You do not have to move everything at once. ScanWow is good for active documents you access regularly; your full archive can stay in iCloud Drive or wherever you prefer.

Shared scans and team workflows

If you were sharing scanned documents with a team through OneDrive, the simplest continuation is to keep sharing PDFs via Files, email, or another tool your team already uses. ScanWow's export uses the iOS share sheet, so you can send to any app your team relies on.