Introducing Google Photoscan with Google Photos

Google is moving into the photo app market in a big way. Not too long ago, Google Photos offered to backup all your photos with unlimited free storage. I have to admit that I was skeptical at first because of the huge quantity of photos I have on my computer, but after starting the service, I quickly had all my main computer's photos stored by Google online for free. Now, the service adds all the new images automatically from my iPhone as well as my computer.

Just within the last few days, Google has added another remarkable service, PhotoScan. This is a smartphone app that lets you scan photos, even those larger than the screen on your smartphone and then automatically adds those images into you Google Photos. Here is a description of the new app from a Google blog post:

Google Photos is a home for all your photos and videos, but what about those old prints that are some of your most treasured memories? Such as photos of grandma when she was young, your childhood pet, and that hairstyle you wish you could forget. 

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. 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. 

We knew there had to be a better way, so we’re introducing PhotoScan, a brand new, standalone app from Google Photos that easily scans just about any photo, free, from anywhere. Get it today for Android and iOS. 

PhotoScan gets you great looking digital copies in seconds - it detects edges, straightens the image, rotates it to the correct orientation, and removes glare. 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.

I have just recently acquired an iPhone 7 Plus and I have been postponing testing the camera and comparing it to my other high quality DSLR cameras because I have been so busy. But now with this new PhotoScan app from Google, I will have to try it out by scanning some photos.

The one issue I see is managing the storage of your scanned images on your smartphone. You can quickly fill up your phone's memory unless you happen to have an Android phone with an SD card option. For Apple phones, you will have to transfer the photos to some other storage, perhaps Google Photos and then delete them from your phone periodically to free up more storage.