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Google’s new PhotoScan makes Digitising your Photo Prints Easy Peasy

Take it from me as I regale my disdain for photo albums. They are thick, heavy and hardly anyone flips through them. Albums are pretty much kept around for sentimental reasons which means no one has the heart to dump them.

The worst part of it all, such albums love to attract an immense amount of dust and if you have memories of wiping these books down every spring cleaning, you know my pain.

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To illustrate my point, here’s what my photo album corner in my home looks like –

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With Google’s new PhotoScan app, available on both iOS and Android, freeing up this shelf might be my next big holiday project to make room for more toys to display.

Photo scanning apps have been out there in the market for quite some time now. You’ve probably even used one to scan your documents and send it out via email with the mobile phone. Think of PhotoScan as exactly that but with even better results. Plus, it’s extremely simple as well.

All you need to do is take a picture as you would normally and the app guides you along. And that’s it!

I found that the PhotoScan app does best in a slightly dimmer area with no direct light shining down on the photo. As you can see from the process and end result, the app actually stitches various parts of the photo together. The most important thing to note would be to hit the HUGE “Save All” button on the top right as none of the photos are saved immediately. I would recommend to do this after the app automatically crops, straightens and rotates your photo. You’d be able to tweak the corners later on if necessary later on as well.

Best part of it all? All photos go onto Google Photos where the pictures can be nicely arranged into individual albums or reside in the chaos of your photo gallery.

The greatest use that I can think of the PhotoScan app would be to actually digitally archive all the Instax prints that have been the rage. If you’re going back even further in time perhaps neoprints would be a worthy challenger to the app. YMMV.