Unfade saves your boxes of photographs from the claws of history

We all have boxes and boxes worth of photographs from the days before digital photography, just begging to be rescued from obscurity. Unfade is a new app from the team behind Scanbot to help photographers immortalize their images.

The app uses the technology that makes Scanbot great, and adds a layer of ease-of-use for photography buffs, taking the hassle and inconvenience out of turning the shoeboxes of photos into a more permanent set of memories, whether they find a new home on Facebook, get tucked away safely on a hard drive or are uploaded to the cloud for safekeeping.

Unfade's interface is minimalist in the extreme, but is perfect for quick scanning jobs where speed and convenience is more important than quality.

Unfade’s interface is minimalist in the extreme, but is perfect for quick scanning jobs where speed and convenience is more important than quality.

The app is particularly tuned to older photographs, automatically detecting faded colors and applying intelligent filters to coax them back to their former glory. The app will also automatically crop the photos, and can share your photographs straight to Apple Photos.

Unfade may not be the perfect match for more advanced photographers; those of us who enjoy a bit of pixel-peeping and taking full control of the digitalization process would gladly invest the time with a flatbed, negative or drum scanner to get the maximum quality from the images.

That’s not the point of Unfade, however. For the average person who has a whole family history worth of images in photo albums and boxes, it makes perfect sense to digitize the old memories with a phone camera; it’s much faster and easier than using a proper scanner, and if the target for the scans is Facebook or other online destinations, perhaps the time/quality trade-off doesn’t quite make sense. Best of all, modern phones take photos with high enough resolution that the “scanned” images can be re-printed with quality not dissimilar to the original prints.

The app costs $4.99 and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store today.