Hi. Let’s rediscover your old memories.
Photo Negative Scanner uses your phone camera to do real time conversion of your photo negatives into digital images. Think of it as a magic loupe that you can use to see film negatives through. Instead of seeing the inverted colors of a color negative, you will see the original photo.
Push the capture button to capture a crisp digital image ready to be shared with friends and family.
If you shoot film with an analog camera this is also a great tool for proofing and previewing home-developed negatives.
When you scan a film negative the photo is saved to your phone. You can view all the scanned negatives from your existing gallery app and share your photos directly to Facebook, Instagram etc.
The app is free, but adds a small watermark unless you purchase the app.
Which we appreciate you considering as it helps us make great apps for all our users.
So thank you.
Getting started
The quality of your scans is determined by the camera in your phone and the light source used to backlight your negatives.
1. Find a good way to backlight your photo film.
A quick solution is to use a laptop, phone or tablet with a white screen. Set the device to maximum brightness. Even better results can be achieved using a light table.
2. Develop photos!
Using the app, scan and convert negatives quick and easy. You can also import photos of negatives that you have made using a DSLR camera or a flatbed scanner.
3. Share your memories.
With your newly developed photos, all that’s left to do, is to share and rediscover memories with your friends and family.
More features
• If the image has a blue or red tint, then manually adjust the temperature balance for the perfect photo.
• Photo Negative Scanner supports both black/white and color negatives. Just press the black and white button within the scanning interface to toggle between color and black and white mode.
• Use the light box feature on a second phone as a light source for developing your film negatives.
Fun & easy to use. With a little bit of work making a backlight box, or using a tablet with a white screen app, I was able to bring old negatives from the 40s and 50s back to life that we found after my Mom died. *Little trick I learned was to crop the picture of the negative a little bit bigger than needed, & then crop out the watermark afterwards. 😉 Cons – Wish it had more ability to make color adjustments after they have been restored. Probably able to do it with better prep work tho.
This app is extremely useful. I had over 200 negatives from both sets of grandparents, taken from 1923-1950. Using my pc screen as a backlight I ultimately got clear, crisp positives of every single picture. It has some annoying bugs, like not focusing on the first try, and every so often the images appear with black and white lines running through the bottom – have to redo those. On the whole, I feel it’s worth the paid version for the trouble and cost it saved me.
I downloaded this app because I have a lot of old, large negatives that don’t fit into my Kodak Scanza. Instead of spending a couple of hundred dollars on a new scanner, I decided to try this app and the results have been GREAT for me. The image quality is really good for the price and it is very easy to use. I know some people were complaining about the watermarks in the comments, but the watermark is honestly very unobtrusive, and I was more than happy to pay the extra couple of dollars to remove it. Thanks to this app, I was able to digitize many of my family’s photos from the early 1900s. The coloring and resolution didn’t always turn out perfect, but if I retried a few times I was able to get good photos for the most part!
I have been playing with this program for over a week now. It is worth the money. I have been scanning my developed negatives with very good results. Keep in mind this is not a professional scanning solutions but a great solution if you want to post your photos online quickly. My testing has produced the best results when I use a lightbox and turn off all the lights in the room when using the app. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a quick solution to scan or review film negatives.
I wanted to find to recover some cat urine damage color 35mm as a simple lightbox scanning app. I tried out three app with one that was worth a purchase. I found this app to be simple enough to where I could edit the photos that have been damaged. With quite a bit of editing I was able to save 10 out of 24 frames Well done designers. 30 year plus old school photographer who has been able to cross over into the digital world.
A little buggy at the moment and lacking simple features that would make this a more useful tool. When you calibrate on a photo and move closer or further it’ll often lock focus where you don’t want it and unlocking the focus causes recalibration, ruining the image. Please let us lock the calibration or disable locking focus. When cropping a photo it’s frustrating not being able to rotate a few degrees or adjust the corners of the image. This won’t let us save to the phone gallery either! 🙂
Capturing old wedding photos from 1987 from the photographer’s negatives. I haven’t purchased yet, just trying the free app. It’s great to see some of our old photos but they’re not as clear as I would like but maybe they’d be better in the purchased version? I’ll see if I have any worth paying to get clearer photos. Definitely easy to use once you find a white backlit background, just point and click 👌
I had a load of black & white negatives and didn’t know who was in them. I tried to look up where I could get them developed and came across this app. The blurb suggests it is for colour photos but a family history website mentioned that it would do b&w. It is wonderful to see them come alive. The quality in some is better than others but I wasn’t expecting anything. They also are saved in the gallery on my phone. I only discovered it about an hour ago and have had great fun!
Superb app that did what other apps can’t. I struggled for ages with scanners and photo editing apps with no real success. This worked first time. Only one small limitation is it sometimes struggles with images that are faint or very dark or even a mix of the two, but 90% were fine, which is 90% better than anything else I tried.
Using my laptop as a back light I revived some 50 year old black and white film negatives with excellent results considering the low tech source. I solved the ‘looking through a fly screen’ effect caused by the laptop screen by placing a piece of white paper under the negative. Any adjustments to improve the brightness etc. can be made with image software on a PC. My phone is a Samsung Note 4.
I was going to purchase one of those expensive negative converters and then came across this app. It’s really great! I already had a light box, so that was helpful. Do they look as good as the originals…no, but the photo this app creates still looks good.
Nice to see old negatives. All have fairly poor quality and blue. It does let me know which to develop. I feel that if I invest a lot in view plates and lenses it’d be better, but just developing select negatives is cheaper. All that said, it’s well worth the download
As a historian and genealogy researcher this app is a GAME CHANGER Thank you!! Used my laptop with a pure white background for backlight placed 100 year old negative from WW1, aligned the screen and like magic the a clear photo was on my screen. Simple and quality.. I immediately paid the $5.49 to remove the watermark so I can go get these precious photos printed without risking these fragile neagtives by giving them to someone to process who may damage or lose them or whatever.
Years ago I found some negatives the size of playing cards,with pictures I’d never seen of my mum and her family.i so wasn’t expecting this to work,so when they came to life when scanning them i got to admit it was really emotional.the app was so easy to use and can’t wait to try it on the loads regular size negatives. so if you have any kind of negatives defo add this app on your phone,you may also get to see photograph’s that you have never seen.👍😃
Excellent! This is the Best thing since ‘Slice Bread’! Extremely easy to use!!! Great Results! Even from a ‘Novice’ like me. I highly recommend this to anyone, weather a Professional or a one time user! Do not hesitate! This is the Negative to Photo you’ve been searching for!!! Kindest Regards
This app is the best I’ve come across. Firstly, it allows you to insert negatives you’ve already scanned and it will process them. Second, it’s quick and easy. It allows you to adjust your final result, and also allows you to make your color film black and white if you chose.
Works great .Recommend for old photos. Tried it with a light in behind a white piece of photo paper and just adjusted old negative closer ir further away from camera till it ca.me in clear and focused.Th en snapped pics of negative which was immediately saved in Photo Negative Scanner memory to retreive later.Great and easy way to instantly develop old negatives into a new collection.What a terrific application.definitely worth it.Trying to get all these photos done would have been very hard.
Awesome, well worth the price. Let’s you load negatives from scanner (or in my case dslr as long as it’s in jpg format) and keep the high resolution. Perfect for my new box camera. Check out my Instagram page to see results as I develope and scan in my film, nathandepuephotography
It kinda worked initially but no longer works at all on my S9+. Great idea, I captured a couple of Negatives of my wife’s parents when they were young, but now I can’t even calibrate it – if I move the camera even a tiny bit it blurs everything and I have to close the program and start over. A big fail.
Just started using this app. I am viewing and taking pictures of very old negatives. The app allows me to archive on my phone. Very happy with this. If I downloaded the app on a digital camera with a tripod to steady my hand the results would be excellent.
Very cool app! Found some old negatives and this helped me decide whether or not i would pay money to have them printed. I wad pleased tho be able to send the photos to myself to keep digitally. Only one at a time can be seen clearly, but it’s been a money saver.
Does its job. However the following could perhaps be improved: 1. saving images takes a long time, 2. tap-screen-to-focus would be welcome, 3. Exposure settings on the fly would be nice. User has no option to correct the exposure prior to save…
Good to review negatives. Handy for reviewing negatives to give you an idea what you have. The focus is a bit iffy but I found changing the phone made a difference. My newer Moto G 4th Gen often didn’t focus. On older Moto G 1st gen focused much better. Not sure if capturing the image will give a good enough result so will probably use my photo scanner, but the App has been super handy to thin them down L.
This app is excellent. I have used it for converting negatives to photos using my phone to take the picture. I find it quite easy to place the negative into the side of the monitor (screen) then take the snap. Thank you.
Very happy to have a tool which lets me convert a negative to a viewable picture!! My only regret is the image does not appear of quality that will produce a good print. That us why not 5 stars But then, they are old negatives, so this app may be fantastic on newer negatives. Thank you!
Update: thanks to the team who responded to my review. The problem of the tiny patterns acrossed the image were a byproduct from using an iPad for backlight? “It’s like looking at the picture through a screen door”. The problem was solved by suspending a piece of glass about a half inch above the iPad screen. LOVE IT!
Not great. It didnt work for my colored negatives and was way too washed out on my black and white negatives. Ive tested my b/w negatives in a darkroom before, so i know they were shot well and had an even white balance. Extremely disapointed because i was hoping i didnt need to buy a heavy duty scanner for my colored negatives. Hope this app is helpful for other people, but it just wasnt for me :/
Great stuff. use this all the time on my old black and white negatives it’s amazing. Otherwise they would just sit there with my pictures from the sixties and early seventies when I was developing my own film Black and Whites and trying to learn and teach basics of photography. I love this app
Simple app, works well, lets you have a look at that strip of negatives you found in a drawer. The camera function could work/lock focus better on my OnePlus 6, but using a proper camera and importing is much better anyway.
A great app for going through negatives. My father was a professional photographer back in the early ’80s and has boxes and boxes of negatives. This makes sorting through them much easier.
Using the app to capture old family negatives from 1940’s and it’s everything I expected and need. Includes the ability to upload directly to my OneDrive Pictures folder and create new folders there as needed. Perfect!
Excellent concept for us who were active in the time of the negative. Not very good quality but expected that for a phone. I will try to construct something to hold negative and phone in place if I do indeed keep the app. Stay well.
This is a dream come-true app! I miss working in a darkroom, so being able to scan my old negatives has been exciting! So far the app is easy to use, and gives excellent results. I can see myself spending many hours playing with this!
Easy to use app. as the first step to convert negatives to digital form. Still need to use photoshop to smooth the final result. However, the app is helpful to save old memories..
Requires a bit of PT, but does the job of seeing your negs. Very easy to use once you get the groove. Needs more power to get the pics clear enough for printing…
The pictures are in the application, but there is no way to get them into a file I can use. They are in the gallery, but they can’t be viewed or used on Amazon pics or Google photos. I can’t even find them on a file in the phone. There is no customer support email or phone to ask questions. I hope I didn’t waste a lot of time…
Photos come out so pixellated to the point of being virtually useless. Okay, I wasn’t expecting professional results but I did expect a little better than this. Have tried everything but no luck. Using a Huawei P20 Pro so it’s definitely not the camera. Oh well, looks like I’m going to have to buy that £300 negative scanner after all.
Simple and excellent. I don’t know why I struggled with the Kodak app for so long. This one is very nicely designed, takes better photos, and has easier cropping. 5 stars.
WOW! Amazing app – blown away to see some old negatives (this works fine for black&white) come alive with my ancestors! THANKS – easy to use on the spot – I hadn’t gotten around to finding a lace to print them in years… Just thrilled…
I lost all of my photos in a flood but the negatives were stashed away in a random box at my mother’s. I was able to scan the negatives and get my precious photos back. Best app ever!