Google PhotoScan can zap old photographs into digital format for sending online, using in other applications or just backing up the old family album.
Google launched PhotoScan on Tuesday, and the new app is available for free for both iOS and Android, according to CNN Money.
PhotoScan is fairly simple. All you do is aim the camera in front of the photo you want digitized and select it. PhotoScan crops the image on its own, rotates it and removes any glares.
Photos can be uploaded directly from the app to the computer.
“We all have those old albums and boxes of photos, but we don’t take the time to digitize them because it’s just too hard to get it right,” said Jingyu Cui, software engineer at Google Photos, according to ZD Net. “We don’t want to mail away our original copy, buying a scanner is costly and time consuming, and if you try to take a photo of a photo, you end up with crooked edges and glare.”
“PhotoScan gets you great looking digital copies in seconds – it detects edges, straightens the image, rotates it to the correct orientation, and removes glare,” Google said in a blog post, according to Site Pro News. “Scanned photos can be saved in one tap to Google Photos to be organized, searchable, shared, and safely backed up at high quality – for free.”
Google has also made some advancements with Google Photos for those users who need a place to store their digitized images, Android Beat noted.
The company has added 12 new styles to Google Photos, which improve upon the editing process drastically, editing photos “based on their brightness level, saturation, and other aspects.”
Google says these new editing tools plus more will be available on Android and iOS by late Wednesday.
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