It is a question as old as time — or at least as old as digital photos: What is the best way to digitize old pictures?
The answer is easy — a dedicated photo scanner. But, if you don’t want to drop the cash on one of those and spend all the time it takes to actually scan individual pictures, Google Photos thinks it has a pretty good solution in it’s new app.
In IT Blogwatch, we digitize pictures of our brother’s ’80s mullet to share with the world.
So what is this app? Danny Zepeda has the background:
Digitizing old pictures with your smartphone has become the common method for preserving old memories, but it’s not perfect. Photoscan makes the process easier thanks to an intuitive design and google’s smarts…the quality of the image using photoscan won’t be as good if you used a dedicated scanner, but it is…better than using your stock camera app.
But what makes PhotoScan special? And how does it work? Harry McCracken has the details:
There are plenty of…smartphone scanner apps…but many are optimized for documents rather than photos, and I haven’t seen any that deal with…problems…from glare on an image to the difficulty of holding your phone at the proper angle. PhotoScan steps you through snapping four overlapping sections of your print photo using a clever bit of augmented reality: It superimposes four dots on the screen, then has you move your phone around to lasso each dot with a circle…Then it intelligently detects edges, straightens and stitches together the four images, removes the glare, and generally polishes up the results. It will even try to rotate the photo automatically if necessary.
By ComputerWorld, excerpt posted on SouthFloridaReporter.com Nov. 16, 2016
