Our fond memories now get captured digitally in photo or video form. But it wasn’t so till ten to fifteen years back. So most of us still have loads of shoeboxes full of photo prints – invaluable memories but locked up somewhere and unavailable to share with others.

There are professional services that help you to get them scanned, but like many other services, even this service has got folded into our smartphones. You could scan your photo prints, at the comforts of your home and save money. Google brings you this power through a mobile App called Photoscan which is available on Android and iOS.

Photoscan is easy to use – almost a child’s play. Try to do this in good daylight, if possible. It senses the edges of the photo, as long as you keep it on a contrasting surface. If at all, it misses the edges, in a rare case, it provides a nice interface to adjust the corners. Photos get saved on the mobile device, in the Gallery App.

Now that the holiday season is ahead of us, it is a great time to take up such an interesting project. Here are additional tips:

  1. Create a good amount of disk space on your computer or cloud so that you could move scanned photos in small batches right away out of your phone.
  2. Rename the photos suitably, keeping retrieval in mind. Name them after the place, event, people, etc. in them.
  3. You don’t have to use your productive time for this. In fact, you should do this project in small time pockets when you are having a break from your important work.
  4. Now that you are doing this project in batches, use prioritization, so that your most precious photos get covered first. Don’t forget to mark photos that you have scanned on the back with a light color marker or soft pencil so that they don’t get mixed with the unscanned ones.
  5. Put this task in your to-do list so that you are reminded about it when you get those disposable time slots.

That’s all and you are ready to pull out photos right for the occasion. Recently I could make a quick mosaic of my photos when there was an appeal in our company to share childhood photos. Check out the feature image. Sorry, that’s the cutest possible, I looked, I guess 🙂

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