How Scanalbum works

1. Finding and cropping each photo

When you upload a photographed album page, Scanalbum runs it through an AI detection pipeline that locates every individual mounted photo on the page — whether that’s one photo or a dozen — and crops each one out individually, straightened and ready to view. Detection combines a machine-learning model (trained to recognize photo boundaries) with heuristic edge detection as a fallback, so it holds up on tricky cases like grid-lined scrapbook paper or multiple photos merged edge-to-edge.

Every crop is editable afterward: you can resize, move, rotate, add a missed photo, or delete a false detection directly in the page editor.

2. Reading captions and dates

Handwritten or printed captions and dates near each photo are read using AI vision, matched to the specific photo they belong to by position on the page. If a page itself has no date, it inherits the most recently seen date from an earlier page — which is why photographing pages in the order they appear in the album matters for accurate dating.

When a date is set (automatically or by hand), it’s written into the photo file’s own EXIF metadata, not just displayed on screen — so the photo still sorts correctly if you later download it or import it into Google Photos or another library.

3. Building the album

Every photo from every uploaded page is placed into one chronological timeline, oldest to newest, with a link back to the original page scan it came from. The original, unedited photo of every page is always kept — cropped photos are copies, never the only copy.

4. Sharing with family

Access to your albums is controlled once, for your whole account, in two possible modes: specific email addresses you add yourself, or anyone with your unique family link who verifies their email with a one-time code. Both modes share the same member list, so switching between them never removes anyone who already has access — it only changes whether new people can join on their own.

An invite link works once for instant, no-code access (and offers to set a password); opening the same link a second time falls back to the normal code-verification flow instead, so a forwarded or leaked link can’t quietly keep handing out access.

Depending on your plan, you can also let family members edit captions and dates, comment on photos, mark favorites, and record short audio stories about a photo in their own voice.

5. Privacy and data

Nothing is public by default. An album is only visible to people you’ve explicitly given access to — nothing is indexed by search engines unless you deliberately share a link. Photos are stored on Cloudflare R2 and processed using OpenAI (and optionally Azure AI Document Intelligence) solely to perform detection and caption reading — your photos are never used to train AI models. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.

6. Plans and pricing

Page capacity, downloads, and family-editing permissions are pooled account-wide rather than sold per album, so one purchase covers every album you digitize. See the full breakdown on the pricing section of the homepage.