Google already has its Google Photos app for backing up your digital photos, but what about your old, physical prints sitting in your closet? Now Google’s got an app for those, too.
PhotoScan is a new app from Google that will digitize your physical photos. The app can scan your photo and then detect edges, straighten the image, rotate it to the correct orientation, and remove glare. You can then back up your images to Google Photos for safe keeping.
While most folks probably rely on their smartphone or a digital camera for taking photos nowadays, lots of people probably have at least a few physical photos from years ago that they’ve been saving. Digitizing these photos isn’t something that Google invented, but PhotoScan aims to make backing up these photos online fast, easy, and free, giving you peace of mind that you’ll still have digital versions of these images if anything ever happens to the physical photos.
Google PhotoScan is launching today on Android and iOS.
Google today also announced some improvements to the Google Photos app. This includes better photo editing, like improved auto enhancements like balancing exposure and saturation, as well as advanced editing controls for light and color that let you fine tune aspects of of your photos like highlights, shadows and warmth.
Finally, Google Photos is gaining 12 new looks, which look like filters. These new looks make edits like brightness, warmth, and saturation and then use machine intelligence to apply a special style to an image.