A photo scanner app is the quickest and easiest way to digitalize photos. Photo scanner apps often provide mid-range levels of quality. But, the results will be perfect for social media, note-taking, or other digital-based media.
Today, we’re guiding you through the best photo scanner apps available for download. We will highlight the key strengths of each app and examine its usability and results. By the end of this article, you will be able to digitalize printed photos with ease.
Let’s dive into our top picks for the best smartphone photo scanner apps. This list will provide options for any smartphone or tablet you may use. This will range from Apple to Google application stores.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple, Google
|
| Price |
Price
Free
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
Best Anti-Glare technology for smartphone scanning
|
| Best For |
Best For
Simple app with brilliant anti-glare approach
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Google PhotoScan is the best photo scanner app available on the market today. There are many reasons why you should use this app to scan photos. Its usability is fantastic, prioritising a simple process for the user to follow for great results.
Its biggest strength comes from its anti-glare approach. This is rare in free photo scanner apps, but it is incredibly important to produce high-quality results. It also makes the process easier and quicker, as you don’t have to try to find a good angle or lighting to eliminate glare.
Google PhotoScan has developed a technique that requires you to take five photos from different angles and stitch them together. Therefore, the glare will move around, and Google PhotoScan will produce a result with as little glare as possible.
Google PhotoScan also produces the best colour retention and accuracy of all the photo scanner apps. This is important for color photography, as we want our reproduction to be as similar to the original print as possible.
Other small features make Google PhotoScan the best photo scanner app. As soon as your photo is scanned, the app exports it to your camera reel. It also keeps a log of your photos inside your app. Here, you can choose more sharing options.
The app is free and available on every application store. So try this one out if you are looking for the best photo scanner app.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple, Google
|
| Price |
Price
Free
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
Whiteboard and Business Card scanning, extract abilities for text and tables, text to read feature
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| Best For |
Best For
Extra features not just scanning photos
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Microsoft Lens is a brilliant photo scanner app that is available in every app store. The software giant Microsoft created an application that allows photo and document scanning to take center stage.
Microsoft created this by providing a range of different scanning options, from documents to whiteboards and business cards. It even provides an option to scan text to extract digital characters. This means this photo scanner app can be helpful if you need to do more than scan photos.
The photo scan process is great. It allows you to take a photo, adjust it, and take more before exporting. So, if you have a big batch of photos or archives to scan, then this could be the quickest method for you.
The photo scanner results are pretty good. Microsoft Lens enhances the photo slightly, boosting the contrast and saturation to counter lighting conditions in the room. This is good for giving photos more pungency, but it can make inaccurate reproductions.
Microsoft Lens is a brilliant photo scanner app for people who want to scan many photos. You may sacrifice image quality and accuracy, but this isn’t an issue for most digital outputs of canned photos over smartphone apps.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple, Google
|
| Price |
Price
Free with paid option
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
Scans negatives, positives, scrapbooks, art and more
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| Best For |
Best For
Photographers who want to scan old negatives
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Photomyne provides an excellent photo scanner app for Apple and Google products. This app’s main advantage is that it scans negatives as well. This is brilliant if you are going through old family albums and find old negatives with no prints.
Photomyne does a great job explaining the scanning process and how to get the best results. This shows a dedication to producing a good app for photographers rather than a simple scanner app just for documents.
There are a few screens to complete before starting your scans. If you do not pay for the extra version, you will also receive ads, so you may have to compromise a smooth process for good results.
The results from this photo scanner app are great. They didn’t overdo the enhancements with the photos and managed to produce accurate reproductions. Photomyne has created a great photo scanner app that is ideal for those who want good photo scan reproductions.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple
|
| Price |
Price
Free
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
Quick sharing to other devices
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| Best For |
Best For
Easy to use and no extra downloads needed
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If you have a iPhone or iPad, your Notes application comes with a photo scanner app installed. If you open a Notes page and click the camera icon you will see an option to Scan Documents. Clicking this will look for a document format through your lens and scan it without pressing a shutter.
The Notes app by Apple is a great photo scanner app thanks to its ease of use. It does not have the easiest output option, though. You will not be able to save these images to your photos directly. You can export them to your Files. An easy way to get around this is to take a screenshot of your scan.
The biggest advantage of this app is that it quickly scans batch photos. The app doesn’t need you to press the shutter, so you can cycle through images in no time. This can be annoying when it doesn’t read your document accurately. But it is easy to delete the last photo and carry on.
Notes by Apple allows you to export your batch photos to the same file. This is incredibly helpful for digitalizing a family archive to your computer. Notes by Apple makes it to this list of the best photo scanner apps because you don’t have to do any additional downloads.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple, Google
|
| Price |
Price
Free with premium option
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
Whiteboard, Book, ID Card, Business Card scanning
|
| Best For |
Best For
If you need to digitalize a wide range of material
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Adobe Scan is made by the digital imaging software giant Adobe. This tells us straight away that this app will have innovative features for photo scanning.
This app’s strengths come from its additional features. It can scan photos and documents as well as whiteboards, books, business cards, and ID cards. This makes it a great app to have on the go if you need to take digital notes.
Adobe Scan did not produce brilliant photo reproduction results, though. It tries to use an AI algorithm to produce anti-glare results. Instead, I found the photo scanner app highlights dust or smudges on the photo that were hardly visible in the first place.
In addition, the photo results could have been more accurate. Adobe tends to add a strong contrast to combat light conditions, so the photos came out much more dramatic than they are. Adobe would have placed higher if it were not for these results, but it is still a great photo scanner app.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple, Google
|
| Price |
Price
Free
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
ID Card and Passport scanning
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| Best For |
Best For
Keeping the scanning process simple
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Clear Scan is a photo scanner app made by an independent digital software company. Its clear interface is fully focused on scanning photos.
Like others on the list, Clear Scan is a free photo scanner app, but it does come with ads. It lets you scan ID cards and passports. For photos, it either takes single images or batch images.
From testing, we have found that the batch process is great for saving a lot of time. However, the results from the batch process turned out strange and unusable, so its biggest positive didn’t work.
The app worked great for single images. Clear Scan is a great option for someone who doesn’t want many bells and whistles in their photo scanner app.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple
|
| Price |
Price
Paid
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
Editing metadata and enhance images
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| Best For |
Best For
A dedicated app that gives you more control over your scans
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Launched in 2013, Pic Scanner Gold was one of the first photo scanner apps to scan multiple photos simultaneously.
Like other photo scanning apps, Pic Scanner boasts various editing features to retouch your old photos. It also lets you remove red eyes and even clean up blemishes.
But what makes Pic Scanner one of the best photo scanner apps is its Recolor tool. It’s a neat feature that restores the color in faded images.
After scanning, Pic Scanner lets you create instant albums you can quickly share with family members. You can also create personalized cards and slide shows!
The price of Pic Scanner Gold is $7.99. This is a bargain, especially since it’s a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
It also has all the features you need for a photo scanner app. You won’t need another one once you have this on your smartphone. Unfortunately, it’s only available for iOS platforms.
| App Store |
App Store
Apple, Google
|
| Price |
Price
Free with paid option
|
| Extra Features |
Extra Features
Flash and self timer options
|
| Best For |
Best For
People who may want to scan documents as well as photos
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SwiftScan is another simple photo scanner app available in the top app stores. It aims to scan documents, but it also produces great photos.
Swiftscan provides easy instructions to help you get the most out of your scans. The app allows you to take multiple images, use the flash, use hands-free auto-capture, and auto-crop.
A big disadvantage is that the images save with a watermark if you do not pay for the full version. A small watermark may not seem like much, but you do not want to repost images with random advertisements on them.
Overall, the image quality was great, so Swiftscan is a good option to explore if you do not like the options above.
So there you have it, the best photo scanner apps for both iOS and Android. Most of the options on our list are all-in-one photo scanners that do everything you’ll ever need. So it’s genuinely a matter of choosing which one you find the easiest to use.
A good portion of the apps on our list are free. But even the apps that require payment have trial versions. So you can try them out before buying them. Using any of these photo scanner apps will give you great digital reproductions of your printed images.