Google has debuted PhotoScan, a scanner app that is designed to scan your old photographs with the smartphone camera. Until now, I made use of Microsoft Office Lens to scan important documents and also old photographs, but the PhotoScan app claims to be a highly optimized app for scanning printed photos in high resolution. This also reminds me of the flatbed scanner that takes an eternity to scan a photo print not to mention the tangled up cords and the messy drivers. It seems that the time has come when all those old dusty prints in the attic will not only see the light of the day but will also be saved in the cloud.
PhotoScan asks the user to take four separate images of the printed photo and then puts them together to create a high-resolution digital copy of the image. Usually if one takes a picture of the printed photos, the resulting image is plagued with distortion and glare (especially for the gloss finish). PhotoScan, however, makes use of computational photography to iron out the undesired effects. Thanks to the Automatic edge detection the app crops photos to the proper size and will also be able to set the orientation.
PhotoScan gets you great looking digital copies in seconds – it detects edges, straightens the image, rotates it to the correct orientation, and removes glare. Scanned photos can be saved in one tap to Google Photos to be organized, searchable, shared, and safely backed up at high quality—for free. Searching for the scanned photos is super easy, just search for “scan” on the Google Photos app and it will display all the scanned images.
With the PhotoScan app, Google has addressed the problem of digitizing printed photos to a large extent. The Google Photos integration will ensure that your old memories are intact and can be accessed at the tap of a button. The unlimited High-Quality storage on the Google Photos will come to your aid while digitizing the old pictures. PhotoScan is already available for iOS and Android. On a related note, Google has also announced an improved auto enhance feature for Google Photos along with new style filters. Filters like deep blue are useful while capturing images of sea and sky together.