USA TODAY International Edition
Google’s app wants to do the scanning for you
Google has a new app to scan your old photos, and it’s really good.
The quality won’t compare to that of a big, traditional flatbed scanner, but in our tests, Google’s new free PhotoScan app looks to be several steps above what most folks get now — taking pictures of old photos with their smartphone cameras. And the glare that’s usually evident is either gone altogether, or greatly reduced, by software.
Old family heirlooms, documents and the like are snapped every day on the camera that happens to be in our pocket, the smartphone, with surprisingly decent results.
The big issue is the natural glare. That is, light spots that show up in the picture.
Google engineers solved that issue by using software to help eliminate glare and produced a must- have app.
Many apps are available, mostly for a fee, to scan documents, receipts and even photos, such as Tiny Scanner ( free, $ 4.99 for pro) TurboScan ($ 4.99) and Photomyne ($ 3.99), but most are targeted toward paper scans, not photos.
HOW IT WORKS
Open the app, line up the photo you want to copy and snap the shutter. Google then asks you to take the picture four times, by lining up four dots, which you do by moving the smartphone over them.
The image is then processed. You can tweak it by adjusting corners or rotating the image.
When you’re done scanning, click “Save All,” and the images go directly to PhotoScan’s cousin, the Google Photos app.
You can scan the photo by placing it on a flat surface, or scan the family wall and take photos directly into the picture frames.
Scanning itself is a laborious process that many of us predigital photographers have gone to as a way of archiving our analog photos from the 20th century.
The two main ways to do it are to use a flatbed scanner, insert one photo at a time and then wait for it to transfer to your computer, or ship them to a paid service such as Scanmyphotos. com or iMemories. com.
David Lieb, the product lead for Google Photos, figures there are “trillions” of “at risk” analog photos awaiting digitization that could be lost, damaged or “faded away to nothing.”
At Google, “we think we have a unique capability to solve this,” he says.
The processing power of recent phones have gotten so good, Lieb says, that Google’s software can work to detect and fix glare, automatically crop the image and adjust colors, within seconds.
In our tests, we took back- toback scans of photos on a Google Pixel phone ( with the PhotoScan app) as well as an iPhone 7 Plus, using just the native camera.
In some of the iPhone shots, you can see the photographer reflected in the frame glass or light streaks on others, both of which were eliminated in PhotoScan.
While both of the Pixel photos looked good, they weren’t fullpage magazine- spread worthy. That said, they were totally presentable for social media.
In less than two years, Google has built a substantial following for its Photos app, boasting of more than 200 million users. The app offers free, unlimited photo storage ( at slightly lower resolution) for photos stored on smartphones and computers.
One of the big selling points of Google Photos is its facial recognition features, which can pick up often photographed faces, eliminating the need to search for “Sam” or “Mom,” because a visual of their faces shows up in search.
Google also announced some new editing features in the Google Photos app, offering the same sort of brightness, contrast and cropping tools found in Adobe Photoshop Lighting and other pro programs.