Google's PhotoScan App Will Digitize Those Awkward Family Photos
Courtesy Google
Google Photos brings all the features, without the fanfare.
The free photo storage and sharing app stays ahead of the curve with new capture and editing features.
I like to imagine the Google Photos team sitting in front of an enormous, unbearably sharp monitor bearing a video feed of Apple's June 13 WWDC presentations—particularly during the revelation of advancements in Apple's Photos app. By then, Google's own service—also called Photos—had been in the market for slightly more than a year, and more than 200 million users had been enjoying features like the ability, with one touch, to organize their photos by who's in them; or to make photo albums based on location; or to get GIFs and short video clips auto-generated from their shots. Which is to say, pretty much the same features Apple rolled out on June 13, although Apple, being Apple, gave them fancy names like "Moments." Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But it also had to rankle, since Google's Photos app had been available for iOSthroughout that intervening year, was entirely free, and came with Google's top-of-class cloud syncing. Oh, and the same "assistant" that would make those GIFs and videos for you would also help you clear space on your phone by deleting old photos that had already been backed up.
In other words, it was better. No matter; low key fits Google's style. And the best thing to do when someone replicates your great idea is have another great idea. Or two.
Which is what Google rolled out last week. First and biggest is a new app called PhotoScan that does pretty much what its name implies—and that's no small thing. Digitization has plagued photographers since the technology's arrival. Anyone who took pictures before the early 2000s, professional or otherwise, probably still has boxes of prints eating space at the back of a closet. Until now, your choices for shedding those boxes in favor of weightless digital equivalents were slim. You could bundle them up and send them to a service, which tended to take weeks and cost tons; or you could buy a flatbed scanner and digitize them yourself, which tended to take weeks and cost your sanity. (Personal experience talking here: I tried it back in 2002 in a space-saving convulsion that preceded a cross-country move. Bad, bad, bad.) In theory, I suppose, you could also use an app like Genius Scan or Evernote's Scannable to convert them one by one with your smartphone, but that seems more like a torture technique than a way to cherish memories.
It's also notoriously difficult to do well, in part because the kind of lighting that lets you capture the lovely colors in your prints also tends to cause glare, making the photos almost impossible to capture cleanly. Previous apps had workarounds, letting you hold your camera at an angle, say, to keep the glare out of frame; the software then corrected with post-processing. Thing was, this resulted in distortions. PhotoScan takes a different approach, guiding you through multiple shots that it then stitches together into a remarkably clean and faithful reproduction. It's stunningly easy and consistently effective, if a little bit time consuming (in my rookie run 13 prints took about ten minutes to get through, with only one warranting a retake, and that mostly due to newbie insecurities). You may need to set aside an afternoon to get through the average shoebox (depending, I guess, on the size of your feet). Once you've made your scans, the photos get backed up to the same Google Photos cloud library as the rest of your photos, where they're easily gathered into albums and shared.
