PhotoScan by Google Photos

- April 21, 2017

Everyone

Photography

( 41,187)

PhotoScan by Google Photos- screenshot thumbnail

Description

PhotoScan is a new scanner app from Google Photos that lets you scan and save your favorite printed photos using your phone’s camera.

Picture perfect and glare free

Don’t just take a picture of a picture. Create enhanced digital scans, wherever your photos are.

– Get glare-free scans with an easy step-by-step capture flow

– Automatic cropping based on edge detection

– Straight, rectangular scans with perspective correction

– Smart rotation, so your photos stay right-side-up no matter which way you scan them

Scan in seconds

Capture your favorite printed photos quickly and easily, so you can spend less time editing and more time looking at your bad childhood haircut.

Safe and searchable with Google Photos

Back up your scans with the free Google Photos app to keep them safe, searchable, and organized. Bring your scans to life with movies, filters, and advanced editing controls. And share them with anyone, just by sending a link.

Reviews

4.3

41,187 total

5 27,264

4 6,305

3 3,088

2 1,730

1 2,800

Juan M. Molina

Very good idea. Unfortunately it's not working as expected for me. Quality is too low, specially considering that I'm taking 4 photos (sort of); way lower than making one normal photo with my Nexus 5X. Also the glare removal leaves artifacts behind. But this is a good app for autocropping, and if that's good by itself.

Anshu Bhatnagar

The app gives mixed results. With lower ends phones I was able to get better quality scans as compared to higher end phones. With my Honor 8 the picture was too bright, too noisy and lack of detail. It did much better with Honor 6X and Redmi 3S. Turning off flash and glare removal provided better results. But in that case the default camera app takes even better scans. So overall a great idea and good algorithms but needs more improvements. Would revisit in the future.

Noah Sawatzki

I needed to send a scan of my driver's license and my social security card to a new employer and using my S8+ camera app worked OK, but it looks at least as good as any scanner I've ever used with this app, maybe better. It's simple, intuitive, and only took a few seconds to get some quality captures to send along. No one would know I used a phone.

Ricardo Abreu

Very mixed feelings about this app. Scanned pictures look amazing, but sharing them automatically adds a "PhotoScan by Google Photos" stamp to the bottom of each image. If the idea is creating cleaner, better looking scans with your phone, how is that not defeated by adding a freaking stamp to the picture once you share it?? Anyhow, picture quality is very good, and the stamp only appears when you share images directly from the app, so it isn't exactly a deal breaker. I would appreciate the choice whether to promote the app using my pictures, though, since I'd be glad to do it in other ways. A bad move in an otherwise great app.

Tejan Dua

If you have OnePlus 5 you will never be able to use this app to get crisp pictures as compared to my 3 year old Samsung Galaxy S5 which can take really clear pictures. I think OnePlus 5 is having trouble in stitching photos together resulting into blurry and choppy images. Have to use my S5 for this everytime.

Kelvin Lloyd Aranilla

It's a brilliant concept, working around glare by stitching multiple photos. A regular photo taken in ample diffuse lighting still comes out better though since the stitched output is severely downscaled. I might keep this app just to see if updates can make this app actually practical.

User reviews

Juan M. Molina June 10, 2017

Anshu Bhatnagar August 13, 2017

Noah Sawatzki May 9, 2017

Ricardo Abreu June 12, 2017

Tejan Dua October 1, 2017

Kelvin Lloyd Aranilla October 1, 2017

Moody Me July 10, 2017

Useless, doesn't work. Keeps telling me to move my phone over 4 dots and never shows me the dots so I have to shoot in the dark. At the end I wasted 30 minutes trying to scan a photo, my phone heated up, and my hands and arms became numb. Deleting now.

HeleleMama YKU August 31, 2017

The resolution of the photos taken by this app is too low. Glare removing is a brilliant idea, however as a photo scanning app, the resolution is absolutely the top priority amount all the others factors. Glare comes with flash light and the reason why we need to use a flash light is that we want to have high quality pictures taken under low light environment. What am I going to do with a no glare however low resolution picture?

Dante Ashton June 19, 2017

App does what it says. Sometimes the glare removal gets it wrong and you need to rescan. Also it tends to pick up the 'grain' of photos, also requiring a rescan. Still faster and better results than manually scanning them. Edge detection is mostly spot on, but does require occasional correction. Thank you, Google, for letting me save my family's history :-)

Roger Clark April 20, 2017

Wonderful way to scan photos ! Beats my flatbed scanner and all the cropping, trimming, editing ect. The only a couple suggestions. Using 4 corner dots when scanning is somewhat tedious, but I'm sure there is a good reason requiring this. Could you please add a multi picture scan mode, the ability to launch an app like snapseed for example, to edit if I wanted too, and finally an easier way to catalog scans into an album or something?

Richard Nguyen June 25, 2017

Really great idea, but I get better and faster results from my regular camera app. Have been using it for months hoping for better updates. This app simply works poorly and rarely gets the framing right. Super blurry most of the time. I really hope they make this app better.

Malc II June 27, 2017

Great app that I never knew I needed. Now I can scan old family pictures and save them to my phone. Plus, glare is removed. It has its flaws, but I love its usefulness. Thanks for yet another useful app Google!

Chandan B S October 8, 2017

Not good. Quality deteriorates after taking a snap of a hard copy photo. It always turns bluish green and unnecessarily brightens the image making it look like a glossy artificial. Default cqmera does a better job if you evade the flash on the photo.

Yousuf Syed June 17, 2017

It can be a bit annoying with the black frame when taking photos, the app is more time consuming when you have to put it over the four dots and when there are other apps that can deliver similar quality in much less time. I would want access tovsime sort of main menu immediately after opening an app rather than after taking a photo, maybe showing a history of all the photos you have took. Would also like the option to save photos on a cloud storage.

Brianna E August 29, 2017

App did not work like it was supposed to. I downloaded this app specifically to get glare out of the pictures before I posted them, but this app did not work at all. My phones camera app actually worked better. This app is a huge waste of time.

Jay Kennedy April 24, 2017

I personally think it's silly to keep thousands of pictures in boxes spread throughout the house from the attic, to the basement.. When they are actually just waiting for the garbage. It's nice that Google made this app to super easily file away those pictures that if you're honest, you'll admit you'll probably never look at again anyway. If your looking for super high quality copies, I suggest you send them off to a service.. Or keep the originals. Otherwise this app totally helps with clutter.

Matt Mifsud September 23, 2017

Poor quality resolution. Perhaps this was designed for the Google Pixel devices with the better camera, but definitely not for any other phone. It's so bad, that I got a better quality photo just by taking a picture with the default camera app. And Droid Turbo doesn't have the best camera.

Kari Sloan May 21, 2017

I tried one pic. I tried it 7 times. It did not remove the glare, and the best job it did, it made it look like my face had been taken over by an actual demon. Like a face-melting, eye-bleeding demon. I just went ahead and took pics of my photos. Thanks for trying, better luck next time 😒

Jay Blayk June 26, 2017

GAHHH unskippable tutorials are the worst!!! Always forget when I haven't used an app yet on a new phone and go to use the app as I always would and suddenly being forced to watch a demonstration of exactly what I'm trying to do (in a little hurry) if only I could skip the fekking demonstration

Shelley Angelone April 27, 2017

Cool idea but holy moly does it make my good camera look like it takes some poor quality pictures!! The crap feature needs a lock so its an even pull and not all over the place. My glare was still there, I get it'll still appear bc its not a full photo exiting app, but it shouldn't say don't sorry about the glare when there's still one. It has potential, but this quality needs fixing big time. I'm not gonna keep a photo of my scanned in family pic and its pixilated. My phone camera will do just fine and make it look legit.

Lachlan Milburn May 11, 2017

I'm not one to review apps but this one is brilliant to no end. I scanned my photos with this app to get them printed and the quality of the prints are purely astonishing. I would imagine that it depends on the camera of the phone but even so, this is great.

Karan Pradhan May 12, 2017

It's a wonderful idea, but I am having issues with a lot of old pictures where the tracker looses the corners, and the image looks a lot more faded than it actually is. The flat removal needs work too. But love the direction this is going in. If these bugs are fixed, if it's just the app I was looking for to digitize and share old memories with my family.

Matt L June 16, 2017

Snapshot quality. Lighting is uneven, glare remains and corners are dark (vignetting). Effective resolution is around 50dpi... eh, I'll consider it for filing paperwork

Alison Armstrong Taylor August 4, 2017

Don't use to digitize your old photo albums! Terribly low-quality, compressed results. Fine for a quick upload to social media, but if you ever want to archive or print, forget it.

Dany Rybnikov August 27, 2017

Super useful app. Results are almost always very clear pictures - black and white photos are just great. The only issue I have is that Photos doesn't see the scans after I save them. So need to copy and upload manually.

Josh Smith July 13, 2017

I love this app, I wish it didn't watermark the picture but I love the glare reduction feature, and that even though they aren't the sharpest resolution possible, the text is crisp and clear, ALWAYS. Great job as always, Google... Let's just hope you're not selling this info to marketers too

Florian Nikolli August 28, 2017

The quality is appalling. Tried it several times. Really bad quality. I just ended up using my s8 normal camera app. And the quality was far superior. The stiching is not up to par.

Craig D June 14, 2017

Doesn't remove glare. I ensured the glare feature and camera flash were turned off, but still got a reflection back from the glass of the picture frame I was scanning. Scans are also poor quality.

JW Leong June 14, 2017

Absolutely disappointing. The resulting photo after the hovering 4 point thing is of worse quality compared to just taking a photo with my normal phone camera. Very poor quality. How is this possible, Google? I'm going back to Ancestry Shoebox.

Robert Ogawa-Monroe April 21, 2017

Very clever.. and, it usually works well (resulting composition is better than just a regular camera shot) but sometimes needs a retake. * To allow user to keep camera in a steady pose, it needs a visual countdown timer (a circle that fills like a clock face) before it actually snaps the corner pictures. (many times, the camera fires before I'm ready & it's stable) * using the set of 5 pictures i would like to see options to correct perspective & angle distortions better. i.e., make a RL rectangle a rectangle shape in picture (not trapezoidal)

Yi Xuan Tan May 4, 2017

THE app I've been waiting for since before it was even announced. Wanted to make one myself but lacked neural network expertise. This is arguably the best phone scanner app out there!

Michelle Allred June 21, 2017

This app is very disappointing. The photo quality is very poor. Images aren't sharp but instead appear blurred and washed out. Taking a photo of a photo and cropping it produces much higher quality results. I'm uninstalling this app.

Piers Powlesland May 20, 2017

I thought that taking 5 shots of the same photo would have given you some sort of super-resolution but boy was I wrong. This app manages to turn a perfectly good camera into a tool that captures absolute rubbish. I feel really sorry for everyone who's "captured" their photographs with this app, later they'll find out that actually all they've got is a pile of garbage.

Dimitri Ivanov May 8, 2017

Ridiculously bad quality makes this useless and defeats the purpose. Photo cameras are already bad scanners for 2-dimensional objects, but you can get much better results by just taking a normal, high-resolution photo with your phone camera in good lighting, playing with the angles. The image processing of this app doesn't effectively remove glare, but it does result in more blurry and lower res images, compared to taking a normal photo. Seems more like Google developers playing with a new and interesting technology rather than a useful and finished product.

September 4, 2017

Nice idea for an app, but let down by low resolution. 0.25 of the camera's capability is no good. I would prefer it rather being able to combine photos to increase the camera's maximum resolution. The app doesn't work well with large, thin photos.

Murfad Syed September 7, 2017

It's laughably bad. Pictures are blurred and useless. The stock camera if my 5x if so much better it's not even funny anymore.

June 28, 2017

Was terrible at scanning. What was with the dots??? I'm disabled and have tremors. JUST SCAN THE PAPER OR PICTURE FOR GOD SAKE!! IS IT SO HARD IN THIS WORLD TO GET WHAT WE ASK FOR NICELY? I have done paid for my mistakes by KARMA and now I am a domestic violence victim trying to Survive. JUST ONCE PLEASE LET ONE APP BE WHAT IT SAYS!!!!

Jonathan Gallant-Mills May 23, 2017

The photo quality is just awful. I'm using an LG G6. Maybe that's the reason it's so awful? I'm using proper lighting and following the directions so this leaves me confused.

Carol Horton August 27, 2017

I am very dissatisfied with this app. Had to wait on the dots and then I either had to rescan or the picture was glared. Being from Google, I thought it would be good. Deleting this app

Allen Abraham August 24, 2017

One of the worst app in the history of Google. Why is it so difficult. Look at Office Lens or Adobe Scan it is way better in all aspects. One have to hold the phone for so many time to even get a good pic....;(

What's New

New quick scan mode

• Toggle off glare removal for one-capture scans

• Great for documents and photos in glare-free environments

Plus, you can now share your scans right from the app.

Additional information

Updated

April 21, 2017

Installs

5,000,000 - 10,000,000

Requires Android

5.0 and up

Content Rating

Everyone

Learn more

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Offered By

Google LLC

Developer

Visit website Email apps-help@google.com Privacy Policy

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View 94043

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