3 Best Photo Scanning Apps to Share Your Family Heirlooms
When you need to digitize a printed photo simply taking a picture of it is not an option. The image will come out blurry and distorted. Some of photo restoration orders we received in the past contains such photos. Luckily, there are apps these days that turn taking photos of photos into approximated scanning.
Whatever app you choose just don’t set your expectations too high. The quality will be lower than what you get with proper scanning and you’ll have a hard time struggling to take a good shot. Here’s some advice:
– Use a dark surface with no patterns so that the software doesn’t take the lines of the pattern for the edges of the photos.
– Use daylight or reflected light to avoid the glare.
– To prevent image distortion, use some weights to hold down the curling corner of vintage pictures.
– Get close to the photo but make sure you don’t cast a shadow on it.
1. Google PhotoScan – Install: Android, iOS (Free)
Google PhotoScan automatically detects edges, corrects perspective and does smart rotation. Unlike other photo scanning apps, PhotoScan takes multiple shots of a photo and blends them, which results in glares automatically removed while also improving the quality of the scan. The app integrates with Google Photos app, so you can save your scanned photos in the cloud for free.
2. Photomyne – Install: Android (Free), iOS (Free with in-app purchases)
Photomyne isn’t a very popular app but it makes up for a great photo scanning app, thanks to its ability to scan multiple photos in one go. You can either scan multiple photos through your old albums or lay out photos on a table and scan them through Photomyne. The app automatically detects different photos and saves them into albums.
3. Pic Scanner – Install: iOS (Free with in-app purchase of $2.99 for full version, Gold version $4.99)
Pic Scanner is a good iOS-only photo scanning app with the ability to scan multiple photos. It detects, crops and saves different photos individually. You can rotate the scans, enhance them, trim, add effects and caption. Note that the free version of the app limits the number of saves & shares to 12. To save unlimited scans and export them, you will have to make an in-app purchase for the full version.
Note: Whatever the results of your scanning are, PhotoHand will accept your images for photo restoration.