This App Will Bring Family Memories Alive On Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is coming – to Canada in mid-October, and to the U.S. in late November. A good time to get old family photographs out of closets, and get them into the digital age. Forget flatbed scanners and manual cropping. Pic Scanner, an app for iPhone, iPad and iPad Touch, does it all. It really does make scanning photos a child’s play.

Download the app from the App Store (Tip: Also print the app’s “Five Minute Guide”, here, for useful hints). Find a well-lighted working space, and place a couple of photo prints ½ inch apart on a plain colored surface e.g. a sheet of white printer paper. Take a combo “scan”, with the camera held 8-10 inches above the prints. That’s it – both the photos will be cropped automatically and saved individually. In our test, we easily scanned, cropped and saved 30 photos in ten minutes!

After scanning, you may further edit the photos, add text descriptions, or convert photos to B&W, sepia etc. Photos can also be posted directly to Facebook and other social media, or transferred to camera roll or Dropbox.

Scanning will preserve, and also allow you to make reprints of your rare, one-of-a-kind photos. If there are old photos that you have but your siblings don’t – or vice versa – this is the perfect way to share and exchange and make everyone happy! Which brings us back to Thanksgiving.

Here are a few ideas of what you could do with your scanned photos:

1) Make a slideshow: Save scanned photos to your computer, then use any CD/DVD burning program (Don’t forget to add your favorite music!) to create a great after-dinner show.

2) Use for craft projects: Reprint scanned photos and make family-themed handcrafted gifts and decorations e.g. coasters, family trees, cushion or T-shirt transfers, photo luminaries etc. Use your imagination, or seek out photo craft ideas from Pinterest.

3) Family history games: Get kids interested in family history: learning about grandparents and great grandparents can be a lot of fun when you can put faces to stories. Again, look up Pinterest or genealogy-related sites.

The evaluation version of Pic Scanner can be downloaded free. It will let you explore all its features, with ten free scans and three opportunities to share photos. We think you will be sufficiently impressed to spend $2.99 to obtain unlimited scanning and sharing rights (Go ahead – Where else can you get a photo scanner that you can carry in your pocket for this price?)

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S A new version of Pic Scanner is released. It is optimized for iOS 8 and features high resolution graphics for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. They have also added App Store pages in Japanese, Spanish and Mexican Spanish languages.

Check out preview here: