Scan twenty single-sided sheets on a duplex scanner and you get forty pages: twenty documents and twenty blanks. Add a fax cover sheet, a page that fed through twice, and a stray receipt someone left in the tray, and a tidy document is now a mess.
Delete by looking, not by counting
Delete PDF Pages renders every page as a thumbnail. Click the × on any page you want gone and it’s dropped from the finished PDF. That’s the whole workflow — and it’s the right one for scanner cleanup, because blank pages are instantly recognisable at thumbnail size in a way page numbers never are.
Nothing is final until you download: Reset restores every deleted page in its original position, so you can be decisive and change your mind.
The pages you keep are copied across exactly as they are — fonts, images, and layout preserved, nothing re-rendered or compressed. Deleting pages never degrades a scan.
The four things worth deleting from a scan
1. Duplex blanks. Every other page, in a predictable rhythm. Once you spot the pattern in the thumbnail grid, they’re quick to click through.
2. Not-quite-blank pages. A “blank” scan is rarely pure white — it usually carries faint show-through from the printing on the other side, plus scanner speckle. Automatic blank-page detection routinely misses these, which is why seeing the thumbnails beats trusting a filter.
3. Cover sheets and separators. Fax covers, “this page intentionally left blank”, and the coloured separator sheets some offices use between documents.
4. Misfeeds and duplicates. A sheet that went through twice, or a half-fed page that came out skewed and unreadable.
Do it before anything else
Blank pages are not free. Each one carries a full-page scanned image, so a forty-page scan of twenty real sheets is roughly twice the file size it needs to be. Deleting them first means:
- Compressing works on half as much data
- OCR doesn’t waste time recognising nothing
- Converting to Word doesn’t produce twenty empty pages you have to delete again
- Uploading to a size-capped portal is far more likely to pass
Limits and neighbours
PDFs of up to 200 pages and 25 MB are supported, since a thumbnail is drawn for every page. For a longer document, split it into pieces first.
An encrypted PDF can’t be edited directly — remove its password with Unlock PDF first (you need to know it), then delete the pages.
And if you also need to move pages around — a signature page that ended up at the front, a section scanned out of sequence — use Reorder PDF Pages instead. It has the same × button on every thumbnail plus drag-to-reorder, so you can do both in one pass and download once.
Ready? Try the free Delete PDF Pages tool now — no sign-up, no watermark, and your file is never stored.