Google PhotoScan
We all have those old albums and boxes of photos, but we don’t take the time to digitize them because it’s just too hard to get it right. We don’t want to mail away our original copy, buying a scanner is costly and time consuming, and if you try to take a photo of a photo, you end up with crooked edges and glare.
We knew there had to be a better way, so we’re introducing PhotoScan, a brand new, standalone app from Google Photos that easily scans just about any photo, free, from anywhere. Get it today for Android and iOS.
Plus, lots of old photos are not easily removed from their albums for scanning. So even though I have a ScanSnap, which is the easiest way I’ve found to scan photos, I can’t always use it.
The results I got were… only okay. Some photos were distorted, and none of them looked particularly great. In other words, you get what you pay for—this is free and easy and better than never getting old photos in digital form, but it’s also not going to give you the quality of scanning items yourself or sending prints, slides, and film to a photo-scanning service.
I think being easy is the key feature, the difference between having photos of questionable quality vs. not scanning at all. Hopefully the quality will improve.
See also: Shawn King, Michael Rockwell, Juli Clover.
Update (2016-12-09): David Sparks:
I tested it with some old family photos and it works great, particularly old photos with not-so-great resolution to begin with.
Update (2016-12-18): I am getting pretty good results, although it really reduces the resolution of the photo. It’s still better to use the ScanSnap where possible.
