Saving
Saving and exporting
The Save menu, export formats, sharing, and what happens after a save.
Saving means exporting a copy
The Save button writes a finished PDF to a destination you choose — the workspace and its pages stay untouched, so you can save again with other settings, share the same document, or continue scanning. Nothing is ever stored inside the app.
The Save menu
Tap Save to open the save menu:
- Select Folder
- Opens the system folder picker. Choose any destination the Files app can reach — iCloud Drive, On My iPhone/iPad, or third-party storage providers. This is the one save action that is always free.
- Quick Save Pro
- Your save presets with a configured folder appear as one-tap actions — tap the preset, and the PDF lands in its folder with its filename pattern and export format applied.
- Smart Save Pro
- Lets the document choose: Neo reads the text and picks the first matching preset. See Smart Save.
- Share… Pro
- Hands the prepared PDF to the system share sheet — Mail, Messages, another app — without saving it to a folder first.
With Single Tap SavePro enabled in the settings, tapping Save runs one configured action directly and a long press opens the full menu — see Save presets and filenames.
Saving only some pages
Select pages first (long-press a thumbnail, then tap others), and the export actions operate on the selection: Save Selection and Smart Save Selection. That way one scanning session can produce several PDFs — scan a whole stack, then save it document by document.
Export formats
Every save uses an export format — configured per preset, including the built-in Default preset:
| Format | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | Neo’s compact export, tuned for scanned documents. Keeps the OCR text layer, keeps color pages in color, and produces small files without any knobs to turn. | Everyday saving. The default. |
| Use JBIG2 Compression Pro | Compresses eligible black-and-white pages with JBIG2, typically shrinking text scans by another large factor. Color and grayscale pages are left untouched. JBIG2 is a lossy symbol-based compression — for guaranteed pixel-exact output use one of the other formats. Cannot be combined with PDF/A. | High-volume black-and-white archiving with minimal storage. |
| Create PDF/A-2u Archive Pro | Writes an archival PDF/A-2u file for long-term preservation. The “2u” level requires all text to map to Unicode, so OCR text stays reliably extractable. Cannot be combined with JBIG2. | Documents that must stay valid and readable for decades — contracts, records, official filings. |
| Export unmodified | Writes the current in-memory PDF exactly as it is — no compacting, no recompression. Available to everyone. | Re-exporting an opened PDF without touching its internals. |
After the save
- A status banner confirms the result — Saved to Invoices/2026-07-07 Invoice.pdf — and long operations show their progress first.
- If Show Preview After Save is on (the default), a first-page preview appears so you can verify the right thing was saved; tap it to dismiss. After a Smart Save, a trash button on the banner deletes that just-saved file again — the escape hatch if it matched the wrong preset.
- Discard Exported removes exactly the pages that were saved, keeping the rest of the workspace — perfect for batch sessions. Discard All clears everything.
Filenames
In the free app, saved files are named document (plus a number when needed). With Pro, filenames come from the active preset’s pattern — dates, OCR-derived titles, sequence numbers and more. See Save presets and filenames.