Scan the Fronts and Backs of Old Photos, Fast

Yes. Completely free, with no account, no watermarks, and no limits. It’s built by Timeline Scan; if you later want your scanned photos dated and organized automatically, that’s our paid service, but the scanning app itself is free forever. If it saves you hours and you’d like to say thanks, you can leave an optional tip: the app never asks.

Any Mac running macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer, both Apple silicon and Intel. The download is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without security warnings.

Yes. The Windows version does everything the Mac version does and runs on Windows 10 (version 1809) and Windows 11, 64-bit. It works with any scanner that has a Windows driver, through Windows Image Acquisition (WIA).

Any scanner your computer can see. On a Mac, Wi-Fi and network all-in-ones that support AirScan/eSCL work with no driver at all, and USB flatbeds work through their macOS Image Capture driver. On Windows, anything with a Windows (WIA) scanner driver works, which covers virtually every flatbed and all-in-one. The Epson Perfection V600, for example, works on both after installing Epson’s free driver.

As many as fit on the glass. Most flatbeds hold four to six standard prints per pass, and auto-detect separates each one into its own cropped, straightened, right-side-up file. A 400-photo shoebox becomes roughly a hundred passes instead of four hundred single scans: that’s the whole point. Our guide to scanning multiple photos at once walks through a full session.

Scan the fronts, then flip each photo over where it lies and scan again. FrontBack matches each back to its front by position on the glass and saves it with a suffix of your choosing (_b by default), so scan_0001.jpg and scan_0001_b.jpg stay together forever. In back mode it even detects the handwriting area on otherwise blank photo backs, and you can rewire any pairing by hand.

Yes. Oversized mode scans a big print (a panorama, an 11 × 14, a mounted album page) in overlapping passes: scan one section, slide the photo, scan the next. Each pass aligns to the last automatically, even laid back crooked or turned, and Finish & Save writes one seamless full-resolution photo. For an album page, Chop It Up then cuts each mounted photo into its own file.

Yes, and no scanner is needed for it. Open an image file (File ▸ Open Bed Scan…), drag images straight onto the window, or point the app at a whole folder of flatbed scans. FrontBack detects every print in the current image, and Split & Next writes each one out as its own cropped, straightened, upright, numbered file, then immediately loads the next scan in the queue: a folder of hundreds of old whole-bed scans is worked through one after another. Every crop is cut from the original full-resolution pixels, and your source files are only ever read, never modified or overwritten. See how it works.

Lay photos any way they land. FrontBack Scanner checks each print’s orientation with an on-device neural network, 99.8% accurate in our benchmarks, and saves every file right-side up. The bed preview shows the corrected photo before you scan, and one click on the ↻ badge keeps the original orientation if you ever disagree.

No. FrontBack Scanner talks directly to your scanner and saves files to a folder you choose on your computer. There is no account, no upload, and no cloud processing.

FrontBack scans one lossless pass at up to your scanner’s full optical resolution (6400 dpi on an Epson V600) and saves archival-quality JPEGs with the true DPI embedded, so photos open at their real physical size. Because the crop happens after a single fixed-exposure pass, a cropped photo is pixel-identical to scanning it alone.