Astronyu Rants

Google has recently launched a new app called Photoscan and releases an update to its Photos app.

Google Photoscan

A new standalone app that help you convert those old photos of yours, one at a time into a digital images. The app, available for free and Android and iOS, uses your smartphone’s camera to scan your printed picture. What’s interesting with this app is it removes the unwanted glares.

Google Photoscan app has a very simple usability. All you need to do is holding your smartphone above a printed picture while making sure the picture is in a frame. The app will detects edges and four virtual dots will appear. Place your smartphone on each dot and the app will capture the image. Once the app captures all four dots, it will then starts stitching together the image into one glare-free digital photo.

Once photos are scanned, you can straight away save it to your device or if you prefer by tapping on the back arrow and tap save all, or manually crop or rotate the image before saving. By default, the app will automatically detects edges of the photo you’re scanning, rotates it to the correct orientation, as well as will try to remove any glares. The scanned image will appear in Google Photos (if you have it installed) and there you can make further edits to your images.

As this is an early release, I haven’t played with its Android version. However, in iOS version I found that the four virtual points often moved away from the pictures. The app also crashed a couple of times. Hopefully Google will address this issue in the next updates.

Download Google PhotoScan for free, from either the Google Play Store or Apple App Store.

Google Photos

A photo and video sharing and storage service by Google. Three new features were added to Google Photos. First feature, the app now gets an improved auto-enhanced tool. Second, twelve new filters called Looks were added. It works by using machine learning to first edits the photo and apply a complementing filter. Third feature is advanced retouching options, which light, color, sharpness and style can be modify to have an optimized image.