SlideScan - Slide Scanner App 4+

Hidden treasures revealed!

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.

OK if you have no other way

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.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the feedback. Try to hold the slide 2 inches (5 cm) away from the computer screen so that there is no transfer onto the scan. If you use an iPhone 13 Pro or purchased the macro lens on Amazon: You can hold the device closer to the slide. Make sure, the image is still in focus. If it gets blurry, try to move slightly back and forth until it gets back in focus. Please reach out to support@photomyne.com so we can assist on how to get the best scanning results.

Useful but fussy

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.