To Scan or Not Scan... That is the Question!

Last summer I went through some old boxes and uncovered my grandfather's collection of slide photographs he took during the 60's & 70's. There were about a dozen boxes of slides and by looking at them through the light, I found memories of my life as a child which I had never remembered and snapshots of my parents and grandparents enjoying life long before I was even born. 

"Here is some of the highly organized slides my grandfather kept"

"here's one of my favorites I've found... a snapshot of my grandparents visiting the Grand Canyon in the 1960's"

My goal then was to take some time and try to digitize as many of these as possible. My first attempt was to contact Costco's photo center. You see, it was Costco where years before I took my collection of my father's negatives of my college football career and had them scan them all. It was a little pricey but so worth the cost. This project included about a thousand pictures and now they are something I will always have digitized, in the cloud and shareable to my old buddies every year as the college football season kicks off. 

Unfortunately, Costco no longer does this service and I was forced to make the decision to send all my grandfather's slides off to an far away service, or try to do them myself. I researched scanners on Amazon, bought one, and decided to do it on my own. Here is the Epson V600 scanner I choose to go with. 

So here I am now, Thanksgiving break 2016 and finding myself jumping back into this summer scanning project. But as I start scanning again I heard about a new app for our smart phones from Google called  "Google PhotoScan". This apps says that it "stitches multiple images together to remove glare and improve the quality of your scans" and all this done JUST with you phone! So, I had to try this out... come on... how great would this be to be able to scan old photos with just your phone!

The tech behind the app is pretty impressive. Instead of just shooting ONE image, it takes four. This way it can remove the direct glare from the flash and then it stitches them all together. I tried this with quite a few times in different lighting and with pictures of different quality. And in the end... would you like to know my assessment?

Well... I'd give it a B-

Meaning... it gets the job done... its better than average... but has awhile to go before it really excels. 
Check out the comparison below as an example. One is with that scanner I bought and the other with Google's PhotoScan.

As you can see.... its a B-

But hey... here's to you Google to keep on improving the app and reaching for that A!

And as for that scanner; that gets a hands down "A+"! I highly recommend it as it does prints, slides, negatives, and even newspapers! Now it takes some time but hey... once its done, you'll have high quality versions of your treasured family snapshots and once you throw them up on Google Photos, they are shareable to your family everywhere. Happy Scanning!

"Two different scans from my wedding in 1996"