Digitising Old Photographs

 

Cambridge University Officer Training Corps REME Wing 1977

I know that Norman is interested in digitising old photos as part of his family tree research and has found some useful apps to help him.  I have just found an apple/android app that automates scanning and enhancing prints using artificial intelligence that might be of general interest if, like me, you have a huge library of old prints.

I tried it and was amazed by how good it is and how easy it was to use.  The photo at the top of this article was done through the app, the one at the bottom used the normal iPhone camera and obviously has work needed to improve it.  The app automatically straightened and enhanced the image, detected faces and sharpened them and allows you to store data such as a title and names of the people in it.

I found a YouTube tutorial about it (click to view).  The presenter is a bit too enthusiastic for my liking but he does produce good content about using Photoshop and Lightroom, (so probably not of interest to most of you).  This one, however, is a sponsored video from Photomyne and includes a code (colin) you can use to unlock the software for free, just install the app from your App Store and follow the instructions in the video to activate it.

Your Photomyne library is stored in the cloud so you will need to back it up for security and to access the files outside the Photomyne apps.  

I have just digitised an album of 48 photos as a trial, it was quick and easy and the images look high quality on the iPhone.  The ability to recognise and optimise and name faces/people is impressive.  There are 2 obvious ways to export your photos out of Photomyne:

• Save to Google Photos
• This would be my chosen method but the free app only allows you to export 1 or 2 images at a time, exporting the whole of my album of 48 images will take some time.  The same problem continued after starting the trial period, it may be a limitation with Google Photos.
• The images in Google Photos retain the title/caption data you enter but not the identification of people in the image.
• Open in Windows or Mac
• The app has several shortcuts/links to enable you to access your Photomyne library from your computer.  Your browser displays thumbnails of each image but every time I clicked on an image a dialogue ox opens up asking me to subscribe.

Conclusion

The capability of this app is significant if you have a large library of hard copy images you want to digitise.  The free app is sufficient to allow you to experiment with the app in order to discover its capabilities but is not enough if you want to digitise a lot of photo history.  For it to be a serious tool, you need to take out a subscription:

• £8.99 a month
• £34.99 a year
• £42.99 for 2 years

There is a 3 day trial period.

I am going to trial it further for a month before deciding whether to take out a 2 year subscription,

The result using iPhone camera alone.