Photo Album Scanner (Split, Straighten and Restore Prints)
Every print on an album page found, straightened and saved as its own photo.
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Glare
Glossy prints reflect light. Take a second photo of this page with the light from another side and add it: glary spots are filled in from it.
Keyboard: focus the photo, then press 1–9 to choose an outline, C for the next corner and the arrow keys to move it (Shift moves faster). Delete removes the outline; Ctrl+Z undoes.
Colour and files
The photos are made on your device and never uploaded. GPS location and camera details are left out of the files.
Photos on this page
Next: enlarge small prints with the Image Upscaler, or sharpen soft ones with Sharpen Image.
About the Photo Album Scanner (Split, Straighten and Restore Prints)
Take a photo of an album page, of several prints laid on a table, or drop a flatbed scan with a few prints on the glass. Each print is found and outlined; its corners are matched, so prints photographed at an angle come out square and straight, and every one is saved as its own photo at the full resolution of your picture — as JPG or PNG, one at a time or in a ZIP.
Glossy prints reflect lamps and windows: add a second shot of the same page taken with the light from another side, and the glary spots of the first shot are filled in from the second. Fix fading stretches the faded colours of old prints back to full contrast, Remove colour cast takes out the yellow or red tint of aged paper, and you can write the date and a caption into each file so photo apps sort it in the right year. It all runs in your browser: family photos are never uploaded.
How to use it
- Photograph the album page from straight above in even light (or scan the prints on a flatbed scanner), then drop the photos on the box — several pages at once if you like. On a phone, use Take a photo.
- Each print gets a numbered outline. Drag a corner onto the print’s corner, drag inside an outline to move it, use Add an outline for a print that was missed and Remove for anything that is not a print. Find the prints again with a higher sensitivity finds prints that are close in colour to the page.
- For glossy prints, select Add a second shot and add a photo of the same page taken with the light from another side. Switch the view to Second shot to check its outlines.
- Below, each photo is shown straightened. Turn it with the rotate buttons, untick the ones you do not want and type a caption and date (year first, such as 1987 or 1987-06-14) if you like. Choose the colour fixes and format in Colour and files.
- Select Download on a photo, or Download all photos (ZIP) for every page at once.
Examples
A phone photo of an album page with three prints, taken slightly from the side
Three separate JPGs in reading order (left to right, top to bottom), each one rectangular and straight, at the photo’s full detail
A 600 DPI scan of four 6 × 4 in prints laid crooked on the glass
Four photos of about 3,600 × 2,400 px each, straightened, the white scanner bed cut away
Two shots of the same page: one with the lamp on the left, one with it on the right
Each photo assembled from both shots, with the reflection of each shot replaced by the other one’s clear pixels
Common uses
- Digitising family albums page by page with a phone.
- Splitting a flatbed scan of several prints into separate, straight files.
- Removing reflections from glossy prints that cannot leave their album.
- Giving scanned photos their real dates and captions before sharing them with family.
How the prints are found
The tool reads the colour of the page around the edges of your photo and looks for areas that differ from it or have sharp edges. Each area large enough to be a print becomes an outline whose four corners follow the print, so a slight perspective is corrected too. This is MySmartCoPilot’s own code running on your device — no AI model and nothing to download.
It works best when the page is a different colour from the prints (dark album pages and white borders are ideal) and the prints do not overlap. Prints that touch may share one outline: drag its corners onto one print and add an outline for the other.
Getting the sharpest result
- Each print gets the detail it has in your photo. A phone photo of a whole album page gives roughly 1–3 megapixels per print — fine for screens and small prints. For larger prints, photograph each print separately or scan at 600 DPI.
- Light the page evenly, without direct sun, and hold the phone parallel to the page. Remove prints from plastic sleeves if they can be taken out safely: the sleeve adds glare and haze.
- Use Trim edges to cut off a sliver of album page or a print’s white border.
- Scans can be JPG, PNG or TIFF; each sheet of a multi-page TIFF opens as its own page.
What the colour fixes do — and what they do not
Fix fading stretches each colour channel so the darkest and brightest parts of the print reach black and white again, which also reduces the overall cast of faded colour prints. Remove colour cast balances the three channels against each other (a grey-world white balance), for prints that have turned yellow, red or green. More colour adds saturation.
These are adjustments of the whole print. Scratches, tears, stains and missing parts stay as they are, and black-and-white prints stay black and white.
Dates and captions in the files
JPGs get the date as the EXIF date taken (DateTimeOriginal), and the caption as the image description and user comment. PNGs get the same EXIF data in an eXIf chunk and the caption as a Description text chunk. Photo apps that sort by the date taken then put a scanned print in its year instead of the day you scanned it. A year alone is saved as 1 January of that year, and a year and month as the first of that month.
Nothing else from your photo is copied into the files: no GPS location and no camera details.
Limitations
- Up to 60 pages at a time; nothing is saved when the tab is closed, so download the photos first.
- Saved photos are up to 24 megapixels on computers and 12 megapixels on phones.
- Only flat prints are straightened: a curved or bent print stays slightly curved.
- Glare that is in the same place in both shots cannot be removed.
- The colour fixes change the whole print; they do not repair scratches or colourise black-and-white photos.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.
Frequently asked questions
Are my photos uploaded?
No. Finding the prints, straightening them, fixing the colours and making the files all happen in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is kept after you close the tab.
What if a print is not found?
Select Find the prints again with a higher Sensitivity, or select Add an outline and drag its corners onto the print. A photo with no clear prints is treated as one print: drag the four corners onto it.
How do I take the second shot for glare?
Take the first photo, then move the lamp — or yourself — to the other side and take another photo of the same page from about the same place. Add it with Add a second shot. The two are lined up print by print, and wherever the first shot is washed out by a reflection that the second does not have, the second shot’s pixels are used.
Which way up are the photos saved?
As they lie in your photo. Use the rotate buttons on each photo to turn it a quarter turn at a time before downloading.
Can it repair scratches or colourise black-and-white prints?
No. It fixes fading and colour casts of the whole print. Scratches, tears and stains stay, and black-and-white prints stay black and white.