snitscanner | Jesper GB Henriksen

snitscanner

A virtual flatbed scanner that runs in your browser. A scanline sweeps across the image and copies one thin strip of pixels per frame into the result. Drag, zoom or rotate the image while it scans and the output smears and stretches.

Open snitscanner Free · no account · nothing to install

Workspace on the left, result on the right.

Four steps.

Load an image

Pick a file, drop it on the page, or paste from the clipboard. It lands on the scan bed.

Run the scan

The scanline starts sweeping. Loop mode repeats forever, single mode does one pass and stops.

Move it while it scans

Drag, wheel-zoom, pinch, rotate. The output records whatever you do to the source.

Export a PNG

The result renders at 1520 px and downloads straight to your disk. Clear and go again.

The controls.

Directionvertical / horizontal

Which way the scanline travels. Horizontal gives the classic flatbed drag, vertical smears sideways.

Scan speedslider

How far the line moves per frame. Faster means thicker strips and chunkier output.

Inkcolor / xerox

Xerox pushes each strip through a luminance curve: crushed blacks, blown highlights, hard grain. Color leaves the tones alone.

Layeringreplace / stacked

Replace overwrites what is already there. Stacked composites each new strip with darken, multiply or screen, so repeated passes build up.

Noise / grainslider

Per pixel luminance noise added after the strip lands. Stronger in xerox mode than in color.

Paper backgroundcolor picker

The colour of the scan bed, so the empty area around your image reads as paper.

Examples.

High contrast black and white scan of a portrait, stretched and torn into offset bands with heavy copier grain. — Xerox ink, stacked layering, grain at full.

Colour scan of a portrait smeared horizontally into repeating bands, the face stretched and duplicated across the frame. — Colour ink, same drag.

Animation of the scanline sweeping while the source image is dragged, showing the result building up strip by strip. — The scan building up strip by strip.

Your images stay on your machine.

There is no backend

When you add an image, the file stays local. There is no upload, no server call and no form post. The processing, the strip copying, the xerox curve and the grain all happen on canvas elements inside the page. The PNG export is generated in the browser and downloaded straight to your disk.

snitscanner is one static HTML file. I have no backend set up for it, so there is nothing on my side that could store or view what you scan.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no sign up, no login, no email. Open the page and use it.

Does it cost anything?

No. It is free and there is no paid tier.

Does it work offline?

Once the page has loaded, the scanning and exporting work without a connection. The two web fonts are the only thing fetched from outside.

Which browsers?

Safari, Chrome and Firefox on desktop. It is developed and tested primarily in Safari on macOS. Touch works, so it runs on a tablet or phone, with one finger to drag and two to pinch zoom.

Can I use the output commercially?

Yes. Whatever you scan stays yours. I make no claim on the output.

One file, two canvases.

The effect is one line repeated: copy a thin strip of pixels from the workspace canvas to the same position on the output canvas, every frame, while the user moves the source underneath. The output is never cleared during a scan, so the strips accumulate into the final image. The xerox curve, the grain and the blend modes are applied to each strip after it lands.

Internal resolution is 1520 px square regardless of how big the panes look on screen, so exports stay sharp. No framework, no build step and no dependencies beyond two Google Fonts.