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Scan old photos with your phone and fix their dates

Published 2026-10-25

Old prints are the heart of any then-and-now reel, and you don't need a scanner to use them. A recent phone photographs a print well enough for a video, as long as you control the light and the angle. The step people miss is the date: a scan remembers the day it was scanned, not 1974.

Photograph a print in five steps

1. Light from the side, not above. Put the print on a table near a window. Overhead lamps cause glare on glossy prints.
2. Flat and square. Lay the print flat (a book on the corners helps with curled photos) and hold the phone parallel to it, directly above. Tilted shots turn rectangles into trapezoids.
3. Fill the frame. Get close enough that the print fills most of the screen, using the normal 1× lens. Don't use digital zoom.
4. Tap to focus on the face and hold still for a moment.
5. Check for glare before moving on. If there's a bright patch, move the print or yourself a little.

Free scanning apps can also flatten the photo and remove glare by combining several shots. They're worth it for a whole album; for ten photos, the camera is enough.

Give each scan its year

When you add the scans to Grow-Up Reel, they'll all share today's date. Two ways to fix that:

• Before adding: rename the files with the year first, for example "1974 school photo.jpg". The tool reads a year at the start of a file name.
• After adding: tap each scan and set the date. A year is enough when you don't know the day; the photo is placed in the middle of that year.

Not sure of the year? Clues help: hairstyles, cars, the paper the print is on, a date stamped on the back. A good guess within a couple of years is fine for a reel.

Mixing old and new

Black-and-white prints, faded colour and today's phone photos all line up together: the eyes are matched in every photo, and the morph blends black-and-white into colour smoothly. To keep the reel watchable:

• Use photos where the face is reasonably large in the print. Faces in group photos can be tiny once cropped.
• Leave out photos where the face is in deep shadow or turned away.
• Slow the reel down (1.2 to 1.6 seconds a photo) when it spans many decades with few photos.