PhotoScan by Google Photos

Google LLC

About this app

PhotoScan is a 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 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.

Ratings and reviews

Excellent for photo album pictures. If you need the best conversion of physical photos to digital, use a flatbed scanner. But if your photos cannot be easily removed from an album, this app is amazing. I've gotten best results using flash and holding the camera in landscape orientation. For portrait photos, hold the picture sideways. The app will often identify the correct orientation and crop it automatically. If not there are manual controls. Flash reflections will be eliminiated.

App is incredibly basic and incomplete. First, realize that the quality of the scans are barely acceptable by today's standards! I get lots of blur and double-vision effects. I get better output from a regular camera photo. I'm using a Google Pixel 3, so go figure. As for the basics: After scanning, there is no photo adjustment. No brightness, no color, no rotation. There's no way to LABEL THE PHOTOS!? No way to organize them in folders!? No way to choose storage location/card. This seems half-baked at best.

Worst thing about this app is the resolution of the scanned photos. I have a pixel 4 and quality is bad. In most cases it fails to fully remove all glare, and so you would probably be better off taking a picture of the photo to get better, more usable resolution. App is cluncky, and results always vary. Larger and darker photos are especially bad. There is no mass export, making it difficult to do a lot of photos at once. Lastly, it's disrespectful to add a watermark on my family's photos.

What's new

Easier capture and save

Scanned photos are saved to your device on capture.



Improved corner editor

In addition to the corners, you can now drag the edges to adjust the automatic cropping of your scanned photo.