Taking a photo of a receipt or document is the quickest way to back up a copy, and there are a number of apps dedicated specifically to this task. While these apps offer advanced features, including automatic edge detection and color correction, they require the user to manually save the final image to their preferred cloud service. Google has just eliminated this hassle with its latest Photos feature.
In an announcement on Thursday, Google revealed that it has added an auto-cropping tool to Google Photos. With this, users can capture a receipt, shipping invoice, or any other document that needs to be saved directly and then crop the image to the edges of the document with a single click.
New! Crop documents in a single tap. Rolling out this week on Android, you may see suggestions to crop photos of documents to remove backgrounds and clean up the edges. pic.twitter.com/mGggRyb3By
- Google Photos (@googlephotos) March 28, 2019
The feature is now rolling out to Google Photos users, who will see a "Crop and Adjust" suggestion appear below a photo of a receipt or other document. Tapping this button will prompt Google Photos to automatically rotate and crop the image so that only the document remains.
Users can manually adjust the angles if the software makes a mistake, and there's also an option to remove color from the image. The final image can then be saved directly to the user's Google Photos account, eliminating the need to manually upload a cropped image from a different app.
There are still a number of document scanning alternatives available for iOS and Android, including CamScanner, Adobe Scan, Tiny Scanner, Office Lens, TurboScan, and others.
