The Major Problem Today’s Photo-Sharing Apps Aren’t Addressing

Smartphone users have been going gaga over the latest photo-sharing apps. These impressive, newfangled apps allow users to quickly organize, edit, and share their photos easier and faster than ever before. However, as great as these apps are, they’ve left out on major aspect of photography: preservation.

Capturing and sharing an experience is the crux of photography, and while today’s photo-sharing apps allow users to do this, they’ve completely forgotten about the analog, printed photographs of the past.

A survey of 250 parents revealed that more than half — 52% — say they yet to do anything with their old photos and videos of their children to preserve them for future viewing. Furthermore, according to ScanMyPhotos.com, the average household has a vast collection of nearly 5,500 digital snapshots, which means entire generations of memories could easily fade away as time goes on.

But what about all those printed photographs that technology and time seems to have left behind? Are they only suitable for widely popular #tbt (Throwback Thursdays)? How can they be preserved for the future?

Well, now there are apps for that too.

Heirloom is a new smartphone app that allows users to snap a picture of their old photos and upload them to a private social network in the cloud. From there, they can be stored or shared with the user’s social network. A similar app called Trunx performs much in the same way as Heirloom, but Heirloom savers users the tedious task of physically scanning photographs.

“For many, the process of capturing old prints is clumsy and doesn’t result in high quality digital images,” said Eric Owski, CEO of Heirloom.

Unlike scanning, users simply have to snap a picture of their printed photographs and Heirloom will automatically remove the edges, compensate for any distortion, and voila, old photo digitization made easier than ever.

Of course, apps such as Heirloom aren’t meant to replace professional photo scanning services who are experts in digitizing 35mm slides, film negatives, and canisters of APS film, but it’s a step towards allowing users to preserve their most cherished moments captured on film.