Google launches PhotoScan for iOS, Android to turn print into digital photos

Capture your favorite printed photos quickly and easily, so you can spend less time editing and more time looking at your bad childhood haircut. Will you be taking PhotoScan for a spin?

Google has added advanced editing capability to its Google Photos app. With digital photos stored in the cloud, such risks no longer apply. So you end up with a near-perfect copy of your original picture.

Once it’s captured, a photo is backed up online and added to your Google Photos library, where the app offers its standard face-recognition and manual enhancement tricks. That’s the key here. But instead of taking just one photo, you take several from different angles before the app stitches them together to form one attractive digitized masterpiece.

PhotoScan automatically opens up the camera and positions four dots over a physical photo. This is one of the unique aspects of this app.

Here’s what you need to know about the changes.

If your office still requires you to submit receipts with your expense forms; has files of outdated documents stored, but not scanned, away; or, God forbid, still actually uses paper somehow, Google has a nifty new app for you.

Overall, PhotoScan did an good job detecting the corners of prints and properly cropping a lot of them. That’s Google’s AI prowess shining through in another app.

Plus, it’s interesting to see Google invest time and machine-learning expertise into preserving the world’s film photos – that’s the most important piece of today’s announcements. Sounds cool, right? The app will also let you adjust the picture and crop it.

The new tools are rolling out to the latest version of Google Photos for Android and iOS.

Google also announced some other improvements to Google Photos Tuesday.

So how does the Google PhotoScan app work? Now, however, Google is making movies a bit smarter, starting with the new Lullaby theme. If you don’t like the video Photos creates, you can always go in and manually edit it on your own. There will be a pet-centric theme in April, and another one for Earth day later that month.

To get started, follow the Google Play link below for PhotoScan, and also make sure your Google Photos app is up to date.