Eternalizing Old Pictures With Photo Scans in a Photo Book

Who should use this and what for?

Anybody who wants to clear up some space in their home, who wants to make sure their photos are never lost or destroyed, or who wouldn’t mind both of these things is a good candidate for using PhotoScan. Through an app available for free for iPhone and Android, they can quickly and easily digitize and organize all of their photos, ensuring that they’re forever safe and findable when the time comes. This is a much better and more accessible option than using a classic, slow scanner or paying someone to scan them for you, and it also eliminates the low-quality problem that you end up with when simply taking a picture of a photo with a smartphone.

Functionality wise, this app is pretty impressive. From the facial recognition feature allowing you to efficiently categorize your photos based on people to the advanced photo editing tools, it’s a lot of fun to play around with. The editing tools include nice filters, the option to change only certain aspects of the photo (like the color of something), or even the possibility to make the photo into an animated video. Once the photos are scanned and edited to your liking, you can easily share them with your contacts, which is a perfect way to keep people in the loop or rekindle long-lost friendships – a message anyone would be happy to receive.

When taking this app for a test drive, it proved to be easy and intuitive to use. It guides you to take several photos of the same picture from different angles and automatically removes any glare you see when doing this. The quality of the scan was about equal to that of what you’d get with a normal scanner, but this could also get better or worse depending on the phone’s camera.

Alternatives

There are actually fewer alternatives on the market than you would expect, but a few other photo scanning apps do exist, such as Photomyne and Pic Scanner. PhotoScan by Google seems to be the most widely used, however, and the one with the most varied and reliable features. If you can’t manage to part with your physical photos, consider giving them a makeover at least, by selecting the best ones, scanning them, and then retransforming them into a modernized, cleaned-up photo book. Whether it’s total or partial digitization, anything is better than letting those old albums pile up and collect dust.