How to preserve yesterday's photos for a digital tomorrow

IF YOU ever needed proof that the analog and digital worlds don't get along, take a look at the shelves of old photograph albums at the back of your dustiest bookcase. If you're anything like me, it's been so long since you looked at them that you barely remember what's inside.
Google PhotoScan uses your phone to copy your pre-digital photosGoogle PhotoScan uses your phone to copy your pre-digital photos
Google PhotoScan uses your phone to copy your pre-digital photos

It ought to be an easy job to scan them into a computer for convenient viewing and sharing - but in practice, it’s fiddly, time-consuming and unrewarding. I gave up on the idea years ago.

The problem isn’t the scanning itself - any all-in-one printer will take care of that - but what happens after they have been digitised. In order to be of any further use, they will have to be cropped and enhanced, then imported into a photo library and tagged and captioned, so they can be found later. Even then, they will be viewable only on the computer you used to scan them, unless you export them to Facebook or some other sharing platform.

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Not before time, a new, free app from Google changes all of that. PhotoScan is a companion to Google Photos, the cloud service I mentioned last week. Instead of a scanner, it uses your phone’s camera to copy printed pictures, then uploads them automatically to Google Photos for viewing and sharing from any phone, tablet or computer. I managed to scan in an entire album of 15 year-old pictures in about half an hour flat.

There are drawbacks: whereas a conventional scanner should give you perfect results every time, because the print is clamped into a light-controlled environment, the unscientific nature of a scan from a hand-held phone is betrayed whenever you try to blow it up on a big screen. But for casual viewing on a phone or tablet, it’s fine.

It’s more of a mathematical process than an optical one: an algorithm analyses each pixel to remove unwanted artefacts and improve the parts that remain. It’s the same category to which the HDR and panorama features on your camera belong.

To make it work, you have to take not one but five images of each photo you want to scan. The principle is that when you look at a printed photograph, the light in the room creates a glare, which moves as you tilt your head or angle the paper. PhotoScan tries to work around this by getting you to copy the picture from slightly different perspectives, by aligning the screen with four white dots.

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This takes a little practice, as the dots move when you tilt the phone, and if you’re holding it sideways to capture a landscape picture, the movement may happen in reverse, until you realise what’s going on and flip it around.

But once you get the hang of it, you can process each picture in around 20 seconds. The app then crops it automatically - though you can adjust it - and saves it to your phone. You can choose to scan each picture individually or several at a time - useful if someone has created a collage on the page of an album - and once you’ve done them all, you can upload them to the cloud at a single touch.

The glare-removal feature works only up to a point, but as the processing power of each generation of phones increases, it is a system that can only improve. Even now, it’s a practical way of preserving yesterday’s world for an increasingly digital tomorrow.

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