What the Tech? Saving holiday memories

(ABC 6 News) – If you’re visiting family over the holidays you may want to take a few minutes to look through their old family photo albums. Every family has their own albums and many of them will probably
have pictures you don’t have.

Why not take the opportunity of a holiday together to help yourself to their photo memories by using your smartphone camera?

It’s easy to save someone’s photos by taking a picture of their picture with your phone. But the results are not perfect. Scanning old photos is best, and the app Google Photo Scan makes it easy.

It captures more accurate colors in the picture by actually snapping 4 photos and combining them to make one digital file. Use these dots to scan the photo, moving the camera to line them up. This tells the app where the edges are. Once that’s done the app automatically crops out the background, leaving you with the photo and not the table or background.

It corrects the color and even removes any glare your camera may have captured coming off the photo.

Save the photo to your camera roll, or better yet, save it to your Google account. Google has a terrific photo app, Google Photos, that stores these pictures in the cloud. So you don’t have to use storage on your phone for pictures.

The photos are there for safekeeping and can be downloaded at any time on a computer or any phone or device.

It keeps getting better because Google Photos will organize those photos into albums, and it’ll use facial recognition to tag anyone in them so you can search using just a name. Or search by place, what’s in the background… want sunset pictures? boom!

It’s a great way to spend family time and tell stories to the younger members of the family. And since the photos are scanned, it makes them easier to share.