I have been using my iPhone as a photo scanner for quite some time. It works just better than the physical scanner most of the time and it’s easy to take a shot and save it. But it has several drawbacks that prevent me from using it as my primary tool when it comes to digitizing old physical photocopies, things like glares, shadows, and irregular shapes.

Google’s PhotoScan app overcomes all these problems I have and did a fantastic job of bringing my old printed or polaroid photos to life in digital format.

Let’s see how it goes.

Launch the app on your phone, aim to the photo and take a shot first. Four white cycle spots appear on each corner of the photo right after.

Move the center cycle to cover each of the white cycles around the corner. It may take a few practices to get familiar with this move and cover action but once you are familiar with it, you will go through the process much quicker and smoother. Once the last cycle is covered, the image gets saved locally for you to review.

As you can tell, the quality of the scanned copy is pretty decent.

If you have a pile of photos to scan, you can snap all of them in one after another and save them all at once when finished.

 

If you have Google Photo account, you can save and upload them all to the cloud all at once. Since Google Photo has a very decent face recognition feature these scanned photos can be categorized much efficiently and automatically.