Google has finally got down to helping you manage your trove of old printed photographs. Yes, finally a throwback and a hat tip to the time when people used to have physical albums where photographs would be stored, and retrieved to be seen on special occasions.
To help you digitize your old printed photographs, Googles today launched a new App called – PhotoScan. The app is powered by Google Photos and helps make clear and glare free scans of old photographs, a tough task at the best of times. PhotoScan does this with a special ability to detect edges, straighten the resulting image and produce an image that should look like it was saved digitally. The app is available for both Android and iOS.
To do this minor miracle, augmented reality comes in the picture, through which PhotoScan creates four points on the frame of the photo which eventually combines the four photos to produce a glare free and sharp image. Post production, you can edit the edges and rotate as per your liking. Further, the image is automatically saved in Google Photos Backup for future high-quality uploading to cloud.
This app can help a lot in the situations when we don’t have a digital image of a person and want it on our phone or even PC. Taking a photo of a physical photograph never generated satisfactory results.
We played around a bit with the app and found it to be really good in producing images taken from a printed photo. Opening up the app will give you a sneak peek of how the app works, post which you will get an option of ‘Start Scanning’. Tapping on that option brings in the app’s own view finder which gives you an option to turn on/off your phone’s LED flash. Pressing the record option brings in four points on the photograph and you then have to take the circle in the middle to those four points which will let app click four different photos. After this, the app will combine, process and give you a digitized version of the photo you were clicking a photo of.
The only issue is that PhotoScan being an app from Google Photos can only save the resulting photos in Google Photos only. So you need to download Google photos in order to save the results in your device. A small price to pay for preserving your history for posterity perhaps.