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 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 — so deleting pages never degrades a scan.
Four things are usually worth deleting from a scan. Duplex blanks — every other page, in a predictable rhythm, quick to click through once you spot the pattern in the thumbnail grid. Not-quite-blank pages — a “blank” scan is rarely pure white, usually carrying faint show-through from the printing on the other side plus scanner speckle, and automatic blank-page detection routinely misses these, which is why seeing the thumbnails beats trusting a filter. Cover sheets and separators — fax covers, “this page intentionally left blank,” and the coloured separator sheets some offices use between documents. And misfeeds and duplicates — a sheet that went through twice, or a half-fed page that came out skewed and unreadable.
Blank pages aren’t free, either — 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 pays off downstream: 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, and uploading to a size-capped portal is far more likely to pass.
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, so 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, since it has the same × button on every thumbnail plus drag-to-reorder, so you can do both in one pass and download once.
Related reading: How to Reorder and Delete PDF Pages and How to Fix a PDF That Scanned in the Wrong Order.
Clean it up with the free Delete PDF Pages tool — nothing to sign up for, file discarded as soon as you download it.