ScanEzi

A small, fast Windows scanner app — a modern replacement for HP Easy Scan.

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ScanEzi scans documents from any scanner Windows knows about, shows the pages as a thumbnail gallery, and saves them as a multi-page PDF or as individual JPGs. It handles duplex sheets, detects and skips empty pages, and lets you crop and rotate each page in a full-size preview.

It is a single small window with no account, no telemetry, and no services — it talks directly to the WIA scanner stack through Windows.Devices.Scanners. When you close the window it waits quietly in the notification area, so pressing the Scan button on the scanner still starts a scan.

Features

• Works with any WIA scanner — flatbed, document feeder, or both. Devices are discovered automatically and can be re-enumerated from the settings panel.
• Duplex scanning — 1-sided or 2-sided on devices with a duplexing feeder. The choice is remembered per device, so a simplex scanner never inherits it.
• A4 by default — plus Letter and Legal, switchable per scan.
• PDF or JPG output — PDF is the default; JPG is one click away. The active format is shown in the header and on the save button.
• Empty page detection — a duplex pass over a single-sided sheet produces an all-black frame from the sensor that saw nothing. ScanEzi recognises those, and fully blank white sheets, and leaves them unticked when saving — while still showing them in the gallery with a red cross so you can see exactly what the scanner returned.
• Tick what you save — every page in the gallery has a checkbox. Untick anything you don't want in the output; the save button and status line count what will be written.
• New Scan — clears the gallery and its temporary files and puts the app back at ready-to-scan without a restart.
• The scanner's Scan button works — pressing the physical Scan button on the device starts a scan, even when the ScanEzi window is closed. The app stays in the notification area for exactly this reason; the tray menu offers Open ScanEzi, Scan now and Quit ScanEzi.
• One copy at a time — launching ScanEzi while it is already in the tray brings the existing window forward instead of starting a second copy and registering the scan button twice.
• Auto orientation — pages fed upside down or sideways are turned upright using the Windows OCR engine. It only turns a page when it is confident, so nothing is rotated by guesswork.
• Full-size preview — click any thumbnail to open the page at full size and rotate it, drag a crop selection, or both, before applying the edit back to the gallery.
• Fluent, native look — Mica backdrop, rounded corners, and Fluent controls via WPF-UI, so it sits naturally next to Windows 11 apps.
• Nothing to configure twice — every setting is saved the moment you change it, and restored on the next launch. No OK / Apply buttons.

Requirements

OS	Windows 10 version 1809 (build 17763) or newer — Windows 11 recommended for the Mica backdrop
Runtime	None — the installer and self-contained build bundle everything. The framework-dependent zip needs the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime
Hardware	A connected scanner exposed through WIA

Auto orientation additionally needs a Windows OCR language pack. Every standard Windows install has one; if none is present the feature quietly does nothing and pages are left as scanned.

Install

Download ScanEzi-<version>-setup.exe from the latest release and run it. The installer is per-user, needs no administrator rights and bundles everything it requires, so there is no .NET prerequisite.

Prefer a portable copy? The release also carries two zips:

• Self-contained build — nothing else to install; unzip and run ScanEzi.exe.
• Framework-dependent build — smaller, requires the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime.

ScanEzi writes only to your user profile. The installer registers an uninstaller in Windows settings.

Updates

ScanEzi 2.0 and later check GitHub Releases on launch. When a newer release is available, the package that matches your copy is downloaded in the background and installed the next time you restart — installed copies run the new installer silently, portable copies are replaced in place. The UPDATES section in Settings shows the installed version, lets you turn automatic checks on or off, and provides a Check for updates button for manual checks.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/docfaii/ScanEzi.git
cd ScanEzi
dotnet build -c Release
dotnet run -c Release

Or use the helper script, which builds and launches in one step:

.\BuildAndRun.ps1

Publish a single-file executable

dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true /p:PublishSingleFile=true

The result lands in bin\Release\net8.0-windows10.0.22621.0\win-x64\publish\ScanEzi.exe and runs on a machine with no .NET runtime installed.

Releasing

Pushing a tag such as v2.0.0 runs the Release workflow, which builds the installer and both Windows x64 packages and publishes them to GitHub Releases. The workflow uses docs/release-notes/<tag>.md when that file exists; otherwise it lets GitHub generate the notes. To re-run a release from the Actions tab, use the Release workflow's manual dispatch and supply the version.

The installer comes from installer\ScanEzi.iss (Inno Setup) and is compiled from the self-contained publish so it has no runtime prerequisite. To build it locally:

dotnet publish ScanEzi.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true -o publish/self-contained
iscc installer\ScanEzi.iss /DMyAppVersion=2.0.0 /DSourceDir=..\publish\self-contained

The result lands in installer\output\ScanEzi-<version>-setup.exe. It installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\ScanEzi.

Usage

1. Launch ScanEzi. The connected scanner is picked up automatically.
2. Click the gear icon to choose the scanner, page size, sides, source, save format, empty-page handling, and auto orientation. Settings persist as you change them.
3. Click Scan Now. Each page appears in the gallery, numbered, with empty pages marked by a red cross. Every page has a checkbox — empty pages arrive unticked.
4. Click a thumbnail to open the preview — rotate it, or press Crop and drag out the area to keep. Apply writes the edit back to the gallery; Cancel discards it.
5. Click Save as PDF… (or Save Images…) to export the ticked pages.
6. Click New Scan to clear the gallery and start again. The pages you discard are deleted from the temporary folder.

Closing the window leaves ScanEzi in the notification area so the scanner's Scan button keeps working. Left-click the tray icon — or launch ScanEzi again — to bring the window back, and use Quit ScanEzi in its right-click menu to exit for real. The SCAN BUTTON section in Settings turns this off with Keep running in the tray, shows whether the listener is registered, and the tray tooltip reports the version, the listener state and the number of pages waiting.

Pages marked with a red cross are empty. They stay in the gallery so you can see what the scanner returned, but they are unticked, so they are left out of the save. Tick one to include it, or set Empty pages → Keep to have them arrive ticked.

The settings panel holds everything that is not needed during a scan, including the refresh button for the scanner list:

How empty pages are detected

A duplex scan of a single-sided sheet gives one good frame and one frame the sensor never exposed. The second is essentially pure black. A sheet that was never written on comes back as pure paper.

ScanEzi classifies each page as content, black, or white by measuring ink relative to the page's own paper white level, after trimming the outer 6% of the sheet (sheet edge and scan-bed background are not content). On real scans a printed A4 page carries about 4.9% ink against 0.025% for a genuinely blank one — roughly a 200× margin, so faint content is always kept and the thresholds sit far from either population.

The sample is taken at 450 px rather than a coarser size on purpose: at 160 px the interpolation averages thin text into the paper and a printed page reads as blank.

How orientation is detected

The Windows OCR engine reads text far more reliably the right way up, so each page is recognised in all four rotations and the orientation that yields the most text wins. If the upright reading is already close to the best score, the page is left alone; if nothing legible is found at all, it is also left alone. Guessing is never preferred over doing nothing.

The whole pass runs on a background thread after the scan, and can be switched off under Auto orientation in the settings panel.

Project structure

File	Purpose
App.xaml / App.xaml.cs	Application entry point and WPF-UI theme dictionaries
MainWindow.xaml	Fluent layout — device card, header badges, settings panel, gallery, footer
MainWindow.xaml.cs	UI controller: discovery, settings, capabilities, scanning, gallery, save
PagePreviewWindow.xaml / .cs	Full-size page preview with crop and rotate
ScannerService.cs	Scanner enumeration, capability probing, and scan execution
ImageProcessor.cs	Rotate, crop, and save-as-JPG
AutoOrientation.cs	OCR-based orientation detection
PageContentAnalyzer.cs	Black/white empty-page classification
PdfExportService.cs	Dependency-free multi-page PDF writer (embeds each page as JPEG)
AppSettings.cs	Persisted settings model
ScanLog.cs	Diagnostic log writer
HpEasyScanDialogGuard.cs	Closes the HP Easy Scan error dialog raised by the scanner's STI button handler
ScannerButtonService.cs	Listens for the scanner's hardware Scan button through the WIA device-manager callback
TrayIcon.cs	Notification-area icon, tooltip, balloon and right-click menu via Shell_NotifyIcon
UpdateService.cs	GitHub release checks, verified downloads, installer/portable update apply
installer\ScanEzi.iss	Inno Setup script used by the release workflow

Files and diagnostics

Path	Contents
%APPDATA%\ScanEzi\settings.json	Saved settings — delete it to reset the app
%TEMP%\ScanEzi	Pages captured during the session
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ScanEzi\scan.log	Per-scan diagnostics: device, source, duplex read-back, page count
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ScanEzi\button-service.log	Scan-button listener diagnostics: registered events and callback errors
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ScanEzi\crash.log	Unhandled exception details
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ScanEzi\update.log	Update helper log — written after the app restarts into a new version
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\ScanEzi	Default install folder when installed with the setup program

Notes and known behaviour

• ImageScannerScanSource.Default is unreliable across drivers, so the source is always resolved explicitly. Auto Detect falls back to whatever the device actually supports.
• 2-sided scanning is verified rather than assumed: the duplex flag is written, read back, and re-asserted after the page size is applied, because some drivers silently reset it. If the device rejects the request, or accepts it but returns a single page, the app says so in the status banner.
• Several WIA drivers report MaxNumberOfPages as 1 and then honour it, truncating a feeder run to the first page. The app raises that limit before every scan.
• Some drivers answer a 2-sided request with one multi-page file rather than one file per side. Those files are split so each side becomes its own page.
• Some drivers return tiny placeholder files (tens of bytes) when a feeder is empty. Those are discarded and an actionable message is shown instead of a broken thumbnail.
• If HP's Still Image registration is present (printers and all-in-ones), Windows launches SDSSLchr.exe when the hardware Scan button is pressed. When the HP Easy Scan application is not installed that raises an error dialog; ScanEzi closes it automatically. The registration itself is machine-wide (HKLM), so a per-user app cannot remove it.
• Edits are written next to the source file in %TEMP%\ScanEzi as new JPEGs; the gallery points at the newest one.
• Closing the window hides ScanEzi to the notification area instead of exiting, because the hardware Scan button listener only exists while the process is running. Quit ScanEzi in the tray menu, or turning off Keep running in the tray, exits properly. Updates bypass this: the app exits fully before the installer restarts it.
• ScanEzi is single-instance per user session. A second launch hands its request to the running copy and exits, which also stops the scan button from being registered twice.
• Balloon notifications are shown through the shell, so they are subject to Windows notification settings. Portable copies have no Start-menu entry, so Windows may file them under a generic name.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome.

1. Fork and create a topic branch.
2. Keep changes focused, and match the existing Fluent styling and code style.
3. Describe the scanner model you tested against in the pull request — driver behaviour varies widely, and a change that is right for one device is often wrong for another.

Please report scanner-specific problems with the relevant scan.log excerpt attached.

Licence

Released under the MIT Licence.

The app icon and screenshots in docs/ are part of this project and covered by the same licence.