Every year when the holidays roll around, I’m posed with the same issue – coming up with a good gift idea for my dad. He’s one of those people who gives great gifts but is very difficult to buy for, so I always feel a gift-giving disparity.
In typical parent fashion, when you ask what he wants he just says “nothing” or “quality time with you.” The latter is great and all, but I can’t say that my presence is always that exciting.
This has forced me to come up with more creative ideas which wind up being more meaningful gifts. So, I guess all is well that ends well.
This year, my plan is to scan boxes and albums of old family photos and put the scans on a thumbdrive so that my dad can save them to his computer. Being that I don’t currently have my printer/scanner in working condition, I had to look into alternatives.
In the past, I had tried Cam Scanner. This was fine for saving images of physical copies of signed documents, but it wasn’t so different from taking a picture of the document with a phone’s camera. There were still shadows and glares.
I decided to try Google’s PhotoScan and, from my first attempt, I knew this would be the winner.
First off, it’s free to use so that’s a wonderful start in my book. And, it’s intuitive and user-friendly.
The way that it works is that you hold the phone over the photo as if you were going to take a regular photo of it. The app turns on a flash so that it illuminates the photo while running the scan. After taking an overall scan, circles pop up in the four corners of the photo. You move the camera to align with the circles as it scans each corner of the image.
With the five different scans, the PhotoScan app pools together one scan that is basically a digital version of the physical photo. Even if you’re in bad lighting or have the photo sitting on a dark table or carpet, it eliminates the glare and shadows and doesn’t factor in the background.
All of this and it automatically saves my photos to not only my iPhone’s camera roll but also to my Google Photos account.
I’m excited to continue working on this project and can’t wait to share it with my dad. My next plan is to use PhotoScan to scan cards and other paper items that take up space!
Staff Writer, Taylor Leddin is a publicist and freelance writer for a number of national outlets. She was featured on Thrive Global as a successful woman in journalism, and is the editor-in-chief of The Tidbit. Taylor resides in Chicago and has a Bachelor in Communication Studies from Illinois State University.
