Given a load of old photos (guesstimate: 500) and a desire to have them digital so they aren't just lost, I believe I have the following options:
1. take them to a photo shop like Snappy Snaps and say "please scan all of these in exchange for approximately £175"
2. spend probably two very boring indeed days feeding them all through my ancient flatbed scanner one at a time

is there some secret third option which is better than either of these? I would like to not spend that much or be that bored

@sil Describe them to an LLM, have it reproduce digital versions

@sil
Completely depends on your expectations for quality.

As someone said, if you just want a record of them, spend an hour taking a picture of each with your phone.

If you have a DSLR you get much better quality by setting up a tripod and angled neutral light, then shooting them with a decent lens. Likely almost as good as your scanner (and maybe better). Takes the same time as the phone.

I do not have any negatives. However, it never occurred to me that taking pictures of pictures with an app could do all the hard work of framing and cutting it out etc and, it seems, it can. Cheers for the Photoscan suggestion; these photos will be going into Google Photos eventually so using their app for this seems sensible, and early tests suggest it does an ok job!

ok, correction: you can't install Photoscan from google photos on an updated Android phone. How very unhelpful. It says it's for an older version of Android, so Google have presumably abandoned it upstream. (the ios version works)
Does anyone else do a good, free, uncomplicated, adless photo scanning app for Android phones?

There appear to be a bunch of sites that offer downloadable apks of the Google PhotoScan app. Do we trust such things, or are they likely to be offering malware disguised as the app?

@sil FairScan is more about documents (and has modes to make things greyscale, but has full color support too), but *might* be useful depending on your photos and the goal. It works for quick successive "documents" with de-skewing, with minimal fuss.

https://fairscan.org/

It isn't as full featured as the Google PhotoScan with optimizations to fix matte photos, reflections, and so on, however.

Have you tried APKmirror for PhotoScan? The APKs are signed with Google's keys; it should be safe.

@garrett I didn't know about the key signing thing (@jamesh mentioned that as well). So all these apk mirror sites actually can be trusted because the keys are still in place? (Assuming that I check, obvs.) I assumed that most of them would have taken the opportunity to put up apks which pretend to be stuff people want to download and are actually crypto miners or something. Signed apks is a good thing! I did not know this.

@sil @garrett Note that there is no web style certificate authorities here.

I could create a new key pair with a certificate saying I'm Google, and use it to sign an APK file. It would successfully verify and show you the name I'd put in the certificate.

That's why I said you should be more concerned with what key was used to sign the package.

@jamesh @garrett yup. So I need to be able to trace the key back... but I would assume that Google publish their keys somewhere, so I'll certainly check that!

@sil From the look of it, the problem is that the last release targets API level 33 (i.e. Android 13), and the store won't let users who have never installed the app before install it on a newer device: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/11926878?hl=en

If you've got an old phone that is logged in with the same account, installing PhotoScan on it should make it installable on the newer phone.

As for checking downloaded APKs, if you've got the Android SDK installed, then "apksigner verify --print-certs foo.apk" will tell you whether it is correctly signed. You'd still be left to decide whether the signing key should be trusted though.

@jamesh ooh, I can do it on an old phone first? that's a neat workaround, I didn't know that. Might give that a try :)

@sil have you got the negatives? Film scanners aren’t that expensive on eBay and could automate at least part of the process.