We all know our print photos and even our digital photos reside in a photo Limbo land. Never really seen or displayed unless we actively prepare scrapbooks, photo albums or other various modes. The fate of our treasured 35mm family slides from a by-gone day undergo an even more dismal fate with limited ways to view them. They remain in a photo graveyard of sorts. But with this app not only do they come alive, they undergo a reincarnation! They are alive again. Not only can they be shared and viewed again and again, they are set to a slide show setting complete with music. Seeing my parents, grandparents and siblings again brings me back to the time when these memories were originally captured on film. They have all passed on now so enjoying these slides brings me joy in ways immeasurable. I love this app so much.

The old adage once again should be heeded. If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. These apps do great on printed analog photos. But on slides, not good at all. If you have no other means to scan your slides then this will give you a very low res, rough picture of your slide. I tried this against slides that I had already scanned with a fairly cheap Wolverine slide scanner. As common sense would dictate, taking a picture of a slide (even with an iphone 13) on a very bright white background will never get you close to an actual slide scanner. Even slides where the people are up close to the camera do not come out clear. They are all fairly blurred. And that’s where the sharpening tool supposedly comes into play. But this only changes the faces and makes them seem superimposed onto the picture with very little quality increase. Do yourself a favor. With what it would cost to pay the monthly subscription on this app for 6 months, you can buy a dedicated slide scanner that plugs right into any laptop and scans slides in seconds. And the quality is very good. 5 to 10 times better than this workaround app.

I’m happy to have discovered this app when I needed to do something with a collection of 20th-century slides. It does a decent job of capturing the images (including surface defects, not ScanSlide’s fault). However it is all but impossible to operate without the voice control unless you have some sort of stand to hold your phone steady while you press the shutter button for three seconds. So I’m grateful for the voice control. I just wish I didn’t have to reactivate it every time I return to the “Add” function. Why can’t it be enabled by default? Also, the control works inconsistently, sometimes doing nothing until I say “Go” up to four times, and sometimes being triggered by a background noise, giving me a random image of the kitchen table among the recovered slides. I wish the filter did more to remove reflected warm light (or a vague reflection of my hand and the iPhone) from the surface of the image, something I can’t seem to prevent while using a computer screen as a backlight.

I have thousands of slides that I have no idea what to do with? I thought I’d try this app to see what the quality was like and the ease of use. You could spend the money and buy the accessories and get better quality images but just doing it by hand quickly, lets you run through a stack of slides in minutes. The image quality is still very good and it is printable. It’s fun seeing slides that are 50 years old and the image quality is still remarkable. I would recommend this app to anyone and if you wanted to go crazy and buy the accessories, you could really get some fantastic image reproductions. I suggest to put a piece of tape over the silver Apple on the back of the phone to keep the reflection from showing up in the image.