PhotoScan: Your photos from the past are fading away in the basement..

In almost every home in Ticino, there is a box. It sits in the basement, in the attic, or at the back of a closet, and inside are printed photographs: grandparents in stiff poses, a wedding from the sixties, holidays in Rimini, military service. That box is falling apart year by year due to humidity, light, and yellowing paper. And nobody does anything, because digitizing seems like a job for professionals. It isn't anymore. You just need the phone already in your pocket and a couple of Sundays.

The first step is called PhotoScan, a free application from Google available for both iPhone and Android. Photographing a print with a standard camera produces mediocre results: glare, crooked edges, wrong perspective. PhotoScan solves the problem intelligently. It asks you to take the same photo from four different angles by following dots on the screen, then merges the images by taking the best parts from each. The result is glare-free, has precisely cropped edges, and is straightened and oriented correctly. From there, it is saved directly to the phone's gallery.

The second step is the one that amazes everyone. A digitized photo, even if damaged, can now be restored just by talking. Open the Gemini application, upload the image, and write a request in simple language: remove the scratches, fix the fading, reconstruct the torn corner. In a few seconds, a cleaned-up version comes back. You can even ask to colorize a black-and-white photo. The free plan allows only a few advanced edits per day, and Google often changes those limits, so it’s best to use them on the images that truly matter.

However, I will stop here and tell you the most important thing in this entire article.

Artificial intelligence does not repair the photo. It reinvents it. When it reconstructs a torn corner, it is inventing what was there. When it colors a dress, it is guessing. The result is beautiful and it is fake. Therefore, there is only one rule with no exceptions: the original scan must never be touched or overwritten. The restoration is saved as a new file, alongside the original. If one day your grandchild wants to know what color that dress actually was, they must be able to look at the real photo, not a machine's interpretation.

Three practical tips that make the difference.

Scan with diffused light, near a window and never with direct flash. Place the print on a dark, matte surface, not on a glass table. The quality of the scan determines everything: no restoration can recover a bad starting point. While you scan, write. Every photo in Google Photos or the iPhone gallery accepts a description. Add names, place, and year. It is tedious work and will become the most precious part of the archive because, in twenty years, someone might still recognize the faces, but not the names.

And do it with your parents by your side, while they are still here. Sit at the kitchen table with the box and the phone, and as you scan, let them tell their stories. Record the conversation with the voice recorder—it’s already inside every phone. You will save two things instead of one.

If you find slides or negatives in the box, set those aside. A phone can do very little with them, and it is better to entrust them to a specialized service or use a suitable scanner. These are often the highest quality images in the entire archive, so it is worth spending a little.

One final recommendation, the most trivial and the most ignored. One copy is not a copy. When you are finished, keep the photos in at least two different places: the cloud service you use and an external drive in a drawer. Phones get lost, break, and end up in the lake.

There is also a solution I always recommend that no one expects from a tech journalist: once finished, make a printed book. Online photo book services start at a few dozen francs and produce an object to flip through at Christmas, without passwords and without batteries. The digital copy ensures nothing is lost. The paper copy ensures they are actually looked at. Twenty photographs a Sunday. In three months, the box is saved, and it is no longer a burden passed from one generation to the next without anyone ever opening it.

Enjoyed it? The next round is on you.

digiTIamo is my volunteer project: I write it for passion, in my own time, for people who want to understand technology without getting fooled. No paywall, no subscription. If this article helped you, buy me something: I turn it into time for the next one.

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