How to Reorder Pages in a Scanned Document

A scan comes out in the wrong order more often than it comes out right, particularly from a sheet feeder doing both sides at once. Putting it right is quick, but you have to work from the pictures rather than from anything the file knows about itself.

Work from thumbnails

Open the file and find the page thumbnails. Everything from here is done by eye: the document has no idea which page is which, and neither does the software. What you are looking at are images, and the only way to sequence them is to read them.

Make the thumbnails as large as the tool will allow. A page number in a footer at thumbnail size is often two pixels tall and easy to misread, and getting page eleven and page seventeen the wrong way round is the kind of mistake nobody notices until it matters.

The duplex problem

The most common failure has a recognisable shape. A double-sided feeder that scans all the fronts in one pass and then all the backs in another gives you every odd page followed by every even page. If your scan reads one, three, five, seven and then two, four, six, eight, that is exactly what happened.

It is worth recognising because the fix is mechanical rather than a judgement call. Interleave them: take the first page of the second half and move it after page one, the next after page two, and so on down. Slower than rescanning if the paper is still to hand. Considerably faster if it is not.

Rotate as you go

Feeders also turn pages over. In a duplex scan the backs are frequently upside down, because the sheet travelled through the other way round. Rotate them as you reorder rather than leaving it to a second pass.

The reason is attention. Once the order is right you stop looking carefully, and an upside-down page in a correctly ordered document is much harder to notice than one in a jumbled pile.

Drop the blanks

Sheet feeders produce blank pages: the reverse of a single-sided sheet, separator sheets, the occasional double feed. Delete them while you are here. A blank page in the middle of a document reads as an error to whoever opens it, and in something that will be printed it costs somebody a sheet of paper for nothing.

Look at each one at full size before deleting it. A page that appears blank at thumbnail size occasionally turns out to have a pencil note, an initial, or a stamp in one corner.

What stays broken

Reordering the images does not change what is printed on them. If the pages carry printed numbers and you have moved them, those numbers are now wrong, and there is nothing to be done about it short of reprinting the document from its source. A contents page in the scan still points where it originally pointed.

Say so when you send it, if the order is not self-evident. One line — the pages came out of the scanner in the wrong order, I have put them right, the printed numbers are unchanged — stops the recipient assuming they have been sent the wrong document.

Practical notes

Do the reordering before you add anything else. Text, signatures and highlights are anchored to the page they sit on, so moving a page afterwards takes them with it. That is usually what you want and occasionally is not, and settling the order first removes the question entirely.

actuallyfreepdfeditor.com shows every page as a thumbnail down the side and lets you reorder, rotate and delete pages from there, then download the result. It works on the page images, so it cannot read a scan or renumber anything — the sequencing stays your call.