Photomyne, for iOS and Android, does an amazing job of scanning front and back of old photos, colourising, and creating animated live portraits

I should state up front that this app really only gives a free 3-day test version, and that you do need to subscribe for monthly, yearly or once-off 2-year period to get the real advantages it offers. The reason is the free version does basically what other photo scanning apps already do for free.

The paid version though really does some unique things. I was specifically looking for an app that would scan the back of photos (not as a separate loose image) as I have thousands of old family photos going back a good 80 years or so, many of which have handwritten notes on the back, identifying people, places, dates, etc. So in this regard, it is a quick tap of the top right of the image, and the app prompts to scan the other side of the photo. So that’s a tick.

It also does pretty good colourising of black and white photos. Once or twice some parts were a bit off (and it won’t know for sure the difference of eye colours), but the photos really do pop out in colour.

Other features are the sharpening specifically of recognisable faces, easy correction of auto cropping, autorotation, as well as some filters for the enhancement process of the whole image.

The most eye-popping feature probably is the live portrait view, where an animated 5-second video clip is created. Doing this on a colourised portrait style photo, is just plain scary.

The Apple App Store has an average rating of 4.7 out of 5, for 1,367 ratings. Note though that exporting of photos from the desktop browser access loses some details. You really want to save your photos from the mobile app, to include saving the extra text details. They have a free Photomyne Share app for family and friends to be able to view the online album in read only mode with all the details.

Interestingly, they also have apps to scan slides as well as film negatives, but as everything is essentially pro costing, you’d want to think about what you possibly want to combine, rather than just paying monthly per app. But if you work smart, you may also only need one or two months to complete scanning your shoeboxes of old photos.

See https://photomyne.com/

#technology #vintage #photos #scanning #photomyne