Posted on January 17, 2025
How to digitize printed photos with your phone
Photographs—on paper. Remember those? If you’re old enough, you’ve probably got an album or shoebox full of them, stuck away in a closet somewhere. You get them out now and then, look through them, feel happy (or sad), depending on your mood (and your age).
But maybe you want to do more with those old photos. Email them to friends or family, or post them to your social media accounts. To do this, you’ll need to digitize your printed photographs. Here’s how.
Get organized
Step one is to sort your photos into categories—by date, subject, whatever. It may sound unnecessary but you’ll be storing your newly digitized photos in the cloud, on your computer or an external drive and it’ll be a lot easier to search your pictures if you’ve got them in some sort of order.
This done, you’re ready to start scanning. You just need an app to do it with.
Choose an app
The easiest way to digitize a photo is to put it down flat and take a picture of it with your phone or tablet. Easiest but not best. A better way is to download a photo-scanning app to your phone or tablet and use that.
There are dozens of photo-scanning apps available but many are not free. Here are three apps that are free and will do a good job of scanning your photos. All three are available for iPhone and Android. All three will perform better if you first clean your lens and use natural light if you can.
- Google PhotoScan: Simple and intuitive to use but it requires time because you must take four images of each photo. The app then blends the four together to produce one high-quality digital picture.
To begin, hold your phone directly over the photo and position the photo within the PhotoScan frame. When you’ve got it in position, tap the shutter button. Four circles will appear, one in each corner of the photo. Hold your phone over each circle and, each time you do, PhotoScan will snap an image. The app minimizes glare and fixes imperfections in the original.
User review: “This app is straight up awesome. There are other good scanner apps out there but this is by far the best photo-scanner app I have ever used.”
- Microsoft Lens: Like a lot of scanning apps, Lens advertises itself as a document scanner, primarily, but it also works well for photos. If you’re a Microsoft subscriber, the app will upload images directly to OneDrive. No account creation or sign-in is required.
Lens is easy to use. Just switch it into Photo mode, center your image in the frame and tap the Scan button. There are a few editing tools available so you can fix imperfections.
User review: “One of the best scanner apps. I’m surprised it can do so many things. Document, whiteboard, QR codes, you name it.”
- Photomyne: This app is available in a free and paid version. The free version offers basic functions and includes ads. It’s quick and easy to use and it delivers very good quality, with vibrant colors and accurate skin tones. It includes basic editing tools like crop, rotate and filters. It lets you colorize black-and-white photos, which is pretty neat, and it also scans slides and negatives.
To use Photomyne, just open the app, position your phone over the image, tap and hold the shutter button for a moment. The app will automatically detect borders and crop your photos, then save them to your phone.
User review: “I’m really liking the app so far. Very easy to use, without a lot of the junk that just ends up complicating an otherwise simple and easy process.”
Picture this: a better world
Here’s something else you can do with your phone: make the world a better place. Pretty cool. But it’s a function you’ll find only on phones powered by CREDO Mobile.
When you join us, you get all you want from your mobile service: competitive plans, great deals on new devices and the nation’s top-rated, most reliable network.
And you’ll get much more. You’ll get an easy, effective way to make a difference in the world by generating donations for progressive nonprofits dedicated to the causes you care about.
Switching is easy. You can bring your current device and your current number. Go to CREDOMobile.com to learn more.