PhotoScan by Google Photos

This app is straight up AWESOME. There are other good scanner apps out there, but this is by far the best photo scanner app I have ever used. In fact, it might even be better than actual photo scanner machines. The quality of scans is great. I scanned several old family photos and they came out clear and accurate. It has to take a picture in the dead center of the picture, then it primos you to move to the four corners of the picture. It similar to when you take panoramic photos with your phone. By taking pictures of the center and each corner, it allows the software of the app to automatically get out any glare, but also maintain the integrity of the photo. Once you're finished with a batch you can save the photos to your Google Photos app. I highly recommend it to anyone, but especially those who have been wanting to scan old photos, but have been afraid of the amount of time it would take as well as the money to spend on a photo scanner. Here is your answer.

It handles both gray and color photos just fine. Instructions are easy - you will be scanning in no time. It handles pictures in frames or behind the glass - its anti glare feature is awesome. I wish they had a bit better border detection as I often find myself tweaking borders for older pictures. The UI for border detection could be better likewise / provide better controls as pictures could get small while it gets harder to catch the border at such scale (with my imperfect eyesight). Still, I like the app a lot. Taking pictures in batches works faster. When scanning albums, just keep going - you can adjust borders for your batch later before saving them all in one go. This speeds things up significantly rather than taking a picture/adjusting its borders/saving one at a time.

I like this app, a lot actually. It does a good job of removing glare, but you still have to have good lighting otherwise some parts of the photo will be brighter than others. But I might just be noticing that bc I like to edit photos and can run into problems if a photo doesn’t have consistent lighting. But even with that I would still give this app five stars, except that isn’t the only issue that I’ve been having. About half the time that I’m trying to do a scan the app just quits and I am sent to my homepage. I’m wondering if this is bc I have an older phone ? I Have an iPhone 6? So is it possible that this app isn’t compatible with my phone. I’m going to give this app 3 stars, only because if it takes me 3 tries to get one scan without the app mysteriously quitting then that def leaves areas for improvement . However if I hear from support on this app who can help me resolve my issue then I will change my rating to five stars. I’ve already tried deleting and reinstalling the app once before.

This app does the basic function of removing parallax from a flat image and it often removes the glare. I use it primarily to scan magazine covers and important documents. A significant problem has been encountered when trying to position crosshairs, as they often move as I remove my finger from the screen. This occurs when the view changes to the overview, so the error is not detected until the image is magnified again. A second problem occurs in the management of the saved images. I do not use Google photos to store the images and so local storage is the Apple photos camera roll. When I modify an image, the app requires that I replace the existing image if I want to keep it. It would be helpful to allow replacing or adding to the camera roll or just storing locally in the App. It would also be helpful to dump local storage directly to an album and then clear the storage without losing the images from the photos app.

I have been using this app to recapture printed photographs. The scanned images are of great quality however, just like anything else there are several factors that need to be considered such as room lighting, condition of original, size of the original, etc. The program does not have photo editing tools, but the scanned image gives you a good copy to start with if you then want to edit it. Most of the images I was able to touch up using google photos edit tools and was satisfied with the results. I am sure the images would look even better with professional editing tools but like I said, this program gives you a better starting point that just taking a picture of the original or even worse scanning the photo.