Scan Old Photos 'in Seconds' With Google PhotoScan App

The Google Photos team just released a standalone app called PhotoScan that lets you scan printed photos with your phone "in seconds, glare-free."

PhotoScan, available for iOS and Android, will let you easily transfer all those photos tucked away in mom and dad's photo albums into digital form when you visit for the holidays — without having to feed them through a scanner or send them away to a photo-scanning service.

Just open the app and hold your phone over a printed photo, make sure the photo fits entirely in the frame, and tap the shutter button once. When four white dots appear, connect them by moving your phone over each one until the dot turns blue. Google recommends you keep the flash on while scanning.

"In seconds, you'll have a glare-free, auto-cropped and auto-rotated digital version that you can upload to your Google Photos library, or keep on the camera roll of your mobile phone," Google said.

The team is also updating Google Photos with some new editing tools and automated movies. For those who don't feel like spending a lot of time editing, there's an improved auto-enhance tool. Just tap on the pencil, select "Auto," and "machine intelligence does the work for you; it applies photography fundamentals to make corrections that pop," Google said.

The Web giant is also unlocking 12 new "looks" in the Google Photos editor. Inspired by portraiture, fashion, and street photography, these new looks leverage machine intelligence to correct exposure and color balance for that specific filter.

There's also a new "deep blue" feature that lets you adjust only the color blue in photos, so you can make it seem like the murky water in your shot is a pretty shade of blue without oversaturating the rest of the image. A "skin tone" feature, meanwhile, lets you adjust the warmth of skin tones in a photo. Say you already increased the saturation of a photo; you can now bring skin tones back down, so you don't look like an oompa loompa, for instance. Google said this will work on a range of skin tones.

Google is also making it easier to transform your photos into thematic movies celebrating everything from your child's first year to your holiday traditions. A new "Lullaby" option will let parents pull together a montage of their baby's photos while a "holiday traditions" theme will help you create a video to look back on Christmases past. Google plans to roll out special movies to help you celebrate National Pet Day and Earth Day in April.