Digitize old family albums
Photograph each page with your phone. We crop every picture, read handwritten dates and captions, and create a chronological album your family can browse online or download as their copy.
How it works
Pricing
The AI work of digitizing an album happens once — so Pro is a one-time price. Keeping the family album hosted, shared, and growing over time is ongoing — so Premium is a subscription.
Try it — the full pipeline on as many separate albums as you like, no card required.
Digitize & download — a larger collection, everything downloadable, and your finished album kept online for a while.
One-time payment. No subscription.
Want to keep it online longer, or let family upload their own albums? Upgrade to Premium any time — from $6/month.
Keep the family archive online — a living archive that everyone can help build.
Renews yearly — cancel any time before your next renewal.
Locked features are visible on every plan’s admin page — upgrade any time to unlock them, your album stays exactly as it is.
Why families use Scanalbum
IRREPLACEABLE FAMILY ALBUMS
Most family albums exist as a single physical copy sitting in an attic or a closet, seen by fewer people every year. Photograph it once and every child and grandchild gets their own copy of the whole thing — not just a description of it.
Family angle: Do you have an irreplaceable album in the family you keep meaning to share with the kids and grandkids?
FAMILY STORIES AND VOICES
A caption gives you a name and a year. It doesn't give you the story your grandmother would tell if you asked her about the picture today. Attach a short recorded audio story to any photo, in her own voice, before that's no longer possible.
Preservation angle: Worried the stories behind the photos will be lost? Digitize the album and have grandma record an audio story about the pictures.
ALBUMS THAT LIVE, NOT JUST SURVIVE
Digitize the albums that matter most and put them up on a screen, rotating full-screen through the family's history, next time everyone's actually in the same room.
Sharing angle: Digitize your most important albums and let them live — rotate them full-screen for the whole family at the next gathering.
See the AI at work
A real screenshot from a real account, not a staged example.
Curious how the detection and family sharing actually work under the hood? Read the full documentation.
What you get
No scanner needed
Not a strict recipe — just what makes photographing an album come out clean and sharp.
Two lamps, one on each side, angled in at roughly 45 degrees. A second light source pointed up at the ceiling for soft bounce light helps too — the goal is no harsh shadow falling across the page.
A single photo of the whole spread is all you need — hold the phone flat and level above the page. Use your camera's full resolution and avoid zooming in, which loses detail exactly where you need it.
A plank spanning two boxes (or stacks of books), with the phone resting flat on top facing straight down. This keeps every page at the same distance and angle — use the screen tap or a self-timer to fire the shutter without moving the phone.
Mount the phone on a small tripod or selfie stick positioned flat and overhead, and fire the shutter with a Bluetooth remote while your other hand turns the page. This is the method we actually recommend.
Glare almost always comes from the page not lying flat. If the album has a thick spine, prop up the outer edges with a couple of books so the whole spread sits level.
What Scanalbum does
Finds and crops every individual photo from a photographed album page or spread, straightened and ready to view.
Handwritten captions and years are read from the page. An undated page inherits the date from the last page that had one — photograph pages in order and dates carry forward correctly.
Every photo lands in date order automatically, oldest to newest, with the original page a click away.
The full, unedited photo of every album page is preserved — nothing is discarded, only copied and cropped.
When we crop a photo, we write the real date into the image file itself — so it sorts correctly if you later download it or import it into Google Photos.
One link for the whole family. Add an email-code check for extra privacy so the link can't be casually forwarded.
See it in action
A synthetic demo album — illustrated placeholders standing in for real photos — showing exactly how a finished Scanalbum album works: sorted chronologically, dates and captions on every photo, and a link back to the original page.
FAQ
Any phone from the last several years is fine. Even lighting matters more than camera quality — our AI does the rest.
Yes — that's the point. Photograph a whole album page or spread, and each mounted photo on it is found and cropped out individually.
Always. The full, unedited photo of every page is preserved and stays a click away from the photos cropped from it.
Yes — they register a first name, last name, and email once, and can then comment on any photo. You decide whether they can also edit captions and dates.
Yes, any time on Pro or Premium — every original page and every cropped photo, as a single download.
Ready when you are
Photograph a few pages and see what Scanalbum can do.
No card required.
Scanalbum