How to scan old printed photos with your phone

Most families have one somewhere in the attic: a shoebox of prints, a couple of photo albums, an envelope from the photo shop. Those photos exist only once, and paper yellows. A flatbed scanner is the most accurate route, but most people don't own one, and working through a box of three hundred prints takes a few evenings. The camera in your phone has become good enough to take over most of that work.

A photo of a photo is not yet a scan

Photographing a print in a hurry usually leaves you with three problems. The flash bounces off glossy paper and burns a white patch into the middle. The phone hangs at an angle above the table, which turns the rectangle into a trapezium and throws off the edges. And the new file carries today's date, so a photo from 1987 lands at the top of your timeline, between last week's pictures.

What you can do yourself

• Switch the flash off and stand near a window. Daylight from the side gives no reflection.
• Take the print out of the frame or the album. Glass and plastic sleeves always mirror.
• Lay the photo flat on a plain, dark surface. The contrast with the light paper keeps the edges clearly visible.
• Hold the phone parallel to the table, straight above the middle of the print.
• Stand close enough that the print fills the frame, and don't use digital zoom.

Scan mode in the Ohhi app

The app has a separate mode for exactly this job. You open the plus menu and choose 'Scan an old photo'. The camera looks for the edges of the print as you move and draws them on screen, so you can see whether the whole photo falls inside the outline. The flash switches off by itself, and a grid with a spirit level sits over the image: as long as the bubble stays in the middle, you are holding the phone flat above the table and the print comes out undistorted.

After the shot the app straightens the image using the four detected corners, so even a skewed capture yields a rectangular photo. The editing screen has a date button, where you fill in when the print was originally taken. That date goes into the photo file, so the scan sits at 1987 in your library instead of at today.

A scan carries no location. Where you happen to be today says nothing about where the print was taken back then.

What happens to them next

Beyond that a scan is an ordinary photo in your library: you put it in a folder, share it with family, or attach it to the album of a trip. If you work through a whole box in one go, it helps to decide up front how you want to arrange things. We wrote about that earlier in keeping twenty years of family photos tidy.

What a scan doesn't have is the location data modern phones write into every photo file. What else sits in there, and how to read it, we explained in where was this photo taken.

Where it works

Scan mode is in the Ohhi app for iPhone. The Android app gets the same mode in a coming update; until then you upload a scan like any other photo. Uploading works in the browser too, just without the edge detection. If you don't have Ohhi yet, create an account; starting for free is always an option.