New Google App Promises to Make Digitizing Old Photos Easier and More Fun

A new app from Google will make it easier for anyone to create high-quality digital versions of their printed photographs. Google's new PhotoScan app, developed for iPhones and Android phones, makes digitizing old photos easier and more efficient.

PhotoScan, which was released last week, uses a smartphone's camera to capture a photo in four sections in order to create a panorama-like shot, the Associated Press reports. The feature is meant to avoid glares that are common among printed photos captured using a camera.

The app can recognize the four corners of a scanned picture, and will then process the image so that reflections and other signs of digital wear and tear are eliminated. PhotoScan can also stitch together a single image from several photos.

Julie Winn, the app's product manager, said using PhotoScan saves time and cost that people usually put into having their pictures digitized by traditional scanners. However, some technology sites like Wired called the release of PhotoScan bad news for the scanner industry.

The app can also restore color in faded photos as well as to aligned corners that happen when a photo is bent. The app can work with photos placed anywhere: on a picture frame, an album, or a table. The digitized photos can then be accessed through the Google Photos service, which can store pictures of up to 16 megapixels in size.

The Google Photos app itself has additional editing tools and filters. It can also enable users to compile digitized photos and come up a video of them with background music.

Aside from these features, Google Photos offers a facial recognition function to identify the same person in different photos. All captured images will also be backed up online.

While PhotoScan has generally earned praises, some have identified minor issues. Stuff.tv says the app tends to overexpose some scanned images, making them too bright and washed-out. The photos, however, can still be edited and the brightness adjusted.

And if you are artisticalluy inclined then you can always consider a service such as Mavenart for turn that old photo into a handmade painting.

Have you downloaded the app yet? Watch this video to see how it works.