PhotoScan by Google Photos

Turn printed photos into digital copies

PhotoScan by Google Photos is a scanning app for people who want to save paper photographs on a phone. Instead of taking one ordinary camera shot, you capture the print through a guided process that combines several images. This can help reduce glare and reflections, particularly on glossy photos, and produce a more even digital copy.

A guided scan, with less manual work

The app helps you capture the full print and can detect its edges, crop away the surrounding surface and correct perspective when the picture is photographed at an angle. The multi-part capture takes a little longer than a single snapshot, but it is designed to address common problems such as light spots and skewed edges. It is useful for family albums, old prints and other photographs you want to keep or share digitally.

Works alongside Google Photos

PhotoScan is made by Google LLC and connects with Google Photos, giving you a familiar place to store and organise the scans. It focuses on digitising physical prints rather than serving as a general camera or photo-editing app, so it suits users with photos to preserve more than people looking for a broad set of camera controls.

At a glance

With a 4.1 rating from about 204,000 reviews and more than 50 million installs, PhotoScan has been used by a large number of Android users. Those figures offer useful context, though whether its guided scanning approach suits you depends on how many prints you plan to digitise and how much glare or distortion you need to correct.