Scanning old photos
Turn a print into a photo on the page: straightened, cropped, and yours to date.
The shoebox of prints is often the best thing a family has. On the phone apps, wherever you add a photo — a memory, What others remember, something passed down and its notes, a letter, the main photo, the resting place — Scan a printed photo sits beside Take a photo and Choose from library. It opens your phone's own document scanner: it finds the print's four corners, straightens it and crops it, on the phone.
On a computer there is no scanner door: scan the print with a flatbed scanner, then Add photos as usual.
Getting a good scan
- One print at a time, on a dark, flat surface — a table, a sheet of card — so its edges stand out.
- Even light, no flash, and no shadow of your phone across it.
- Hold the phone flat above the print and let the scanner find the corners; you can move them yourself before you keep the scan.
- A card with writing — a recipe in their hand, the back of a photo — scans the same way.
What the scanner does, and doesn't
It finds the edges, straightens the print and crops it, and lets you turn it the right way up. Nothing is cleaned up or changed: no restoring, no colouring, no stains or creases taken out — the photo on the page is the print as it is. On an iPhone or iPad the scanner offers its own filters; choose Photo to keep the colours as they are. The crop button on each photo in the form is still there if you want Original, 4:3 or a square.
When and where
A scan says nothing about when the picture was taken — only when you scanned it — so it arrives with no date and no place. Give the memory its When — a year, or the 1970s is fine — and, if you know it, a date for the photo itself with Edit when it was taken. See What each photo knows.
The print itself stays with you. A memory holds up to 100 photos and videos; scan more pages than that and the first ones are added, and the form says so.