A 2014 review considered that the reasons to purchase VueScan are to allow older scanners not supported by drivers for newer operating systems to be used in more up-to-date systems and for better scanning and processing of photographs (prints; also slides and negatives when supported by scanners) than is afforded by manufacturers' software.

[8] In 2019 when Apple released macOS Catalina, they removed support for running 32-bit programs, including 32-bit drivers for scanning equipment.

In response, Hamrick released VueScan 9.7, effectively saving thousands of scanners from being rendered obsolete.

[10] VueScan supports an increasing number of scanners and digital cameras; 2,400 on Windows, 2,100 on Mac OS X and 1,900 on Linux in 2018.

VueScan supports optical character recognition (OCR), with English included, and 32 additional language packages available on its website.