Photo Scanning App?

[Camaroon]

Hey all, not sure if this is the best place to post this, so point me in the right direction if not. I found an article on Lifehacker yesterday about a new app Google released called Photoscan, whose purpose to help you archive photos by taking picture of them with your phone, then the app optimizes the picture and uploads them to Google Drive. I tons of photos I was going to archive by simply taking pictures of them with my phone, but this app sounds appealing for this task. I have a spare Galaxy hanging around so I could use it for this, but just curious if there's anything on Windows that people have used or know about that is similar. Thanks!

 

[Gworkshop]

Hello,
Maybe there are more apps in the store but I think the best is the Office Lens.
You can 'scan' with this app photos, whiteboards and so on.
After you ceate a picture you can upload your onedrive.

 

[Kevin Rush]

"How to" / "best practices" articles have been written about digitizing photos, especially from family photo albums. They usually focus on the topics of quality, speed, and ease of the scanning. The articles almost always recommend a flat bed scanner with desktop software and discount the phone camera apps as 2nd or 3rd class in terms of quality. Using a tripod like setup does improve the stability (relates to focus) and alignment, but then the color and resolution (pixels per inch and total number of pixels) depends on the quality of the phone camera. Certainly, there are bad phone cameras and a few great ones such as the "Lumias".

That all said, I use Office Lens with my Lumia, with its camera button, to document documents for future reference. In these cases, accurate precise orientation is less important than speed, ease of scanning and basic readability plus the images automatically upload to OneDrive.

It depends on your use case and your goal. If you are just looking to create an index of your photos and will retain your photos, no problem, go ahead with your phone camera to make an index. But if you intend to toss the one-of-a-kind originals, as many people do, then a good flat bed scanner and desktop software is recommended.

Pick the right tool for the job depending on how important the work is.

Best Wishes

 

[Camaroon]

Thank you both for the replies. With regards to best practices, I'd love to use a nice scanner to do it, but I'm not so concerned with having the best quality for the photos. It's more or less just the idea of archiving them so we don't lose them. We're not planning on throwing away the originals. That's the appeal of the photoscan app. As for Office Lens, definitely aware of the app but to be honest, I've always used a different one for document scanning, CamScanner, which I think does a better job of finalizing a document after it's scanned. I'll look at Office Lens again for this task, but my sister downloaded this photoscan app on her iPhone yesterday and it worked flawlessly. Was very impressed by it.

 

[Kevin Rush]

If your goal is just documenting each photo at a lower quality for archive record keeping, then just use any camera or camera phone that makes the whole process, each and every step, easy and quick. Really, no app necessary, just snap the pic and let it auto upload to the internet.

Best Wishes

 

[Camaroon]

Thanks Kevin.