Digitise your old photos for free

The traditional way to digitise old photos is to use a flatbed scanner or all-in-one printer, and either the software it came with or a third-party program such as Vuescan (www.snipca.com/44867).

But if you don’t have access to one, and can’t afford to pay for a professional scanning service, you can digitise your photos for free using your smartphone’s camera.

Google’s excellent free Photoscan app for Android (www.snipca.com/44869) and IOS (www.snipca.com/44871) makes scanning photos incredibly easy and produces impressive results. It removes glare from glossy prints, detects the edges of images and crops them accordingly, and applies smart rotation to keep your pictures the right way up no matter which way you scan them.

To use Photoscan, hold your phone over a photo until it fits in the onscreen frame, then press the shutter button. Four white circles will now appear on your screen. Move your phone so that the selection ring (see screenshot) surrounds each one in turn.

Once this is done, you’ll see a green tick confirming that the photo has been scanned. Tap the thumbnail image in the bottom right to view the result. All scanned pictures are automatically saved to Google Photos, so you can edit them on your phone or in your PC browser.

It’s also possible to digitise old negatives and slides using your phone’s camera. The best completely free app (as opposed to a free trial) is Kodak Mobile Film Scanner for Android (www.snipca.com/44875) and IOS (www.snipca.com/44876).

It’s designed to be used with Kodak’s lightbox of the same name, but you can cheat by displaying a bright white background on your laptop, tablet or another phone to use as a light source. Place the slide or negative on the screen of the device (or preferably just above to avoid pixelation), select the type of item to scan and press the shutter button in the app.

Kodak Mobile Film Scanner offers basic editing functions for cropping your scans and adjusting the colour and contrast.