FrontBack Scanner · Application Help

Every Control, One Page

The everyday flow is four clicks: Preview, Scan, flip the photos, Scan. This page covers everything past that: zooming in on the bed, rotating a crop by a fraction of a degree, rewiring a front-and-back pair by hand, and the shortcuts that make a big session fly.

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Orientation

The Window at a Glance

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The FrontBack Scanner window: toolbar on top, scanner bed with four detected photos on the left, output settings and region list in the sidebar on the right — A real session: four photos found on the glass, one selected, two flagged to be turned upright.

Toolbar (top). The scanner picker, Preview, the Detect Regions control with its Auto lock, Pair Backs, and a status line that narrates what the app just did.

Bed (left). A live preview of the glass. Every photo the app finds gets an amber box, a filename tag, and its own handles. Everything here is clickable and draggable.

Sidebar (right). Output settings (name, resolution, color, back suffix, folder), the draw-side switch, the Scan button, one row per region, and thumbnails of what you just saved.

Zoom cluster (bottom-right of the bed). Reads FIT at rest and shows the zoom percentage while you are in close.

Regions

Boxes on the Bed

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Auto-detect draws the boxes for you, but every box stays fully hand-editable.

Draw a box: drag on empty glass. It becomes a front or a back depending on the draw-side switch in the sidebar.
Select: click a box. Where boxes overlap, click again to select the one underneath. Clicking empty glass deselects.
Move: drag the selected box by its body.
Resize: corner handles resize freely; edge handles resize along that one axis. You can grab any box's edge without selecting it first.
Rotate: drag the round knob above the box. It snaps to perfectly square only when you are within about a third of a degree, so a deliberate slight tilt sticks.
Fine rotate: hold ⇧ Shift on the knob and it gears down 8 to 1 with no snapping, for sub-degree nudges.
Draw over: hold ⌥ Option and drag to force a brand-new box, even starting on top of the selected one.
Delete: press ⌫, click the trash can on the region's sidebar row, or right-click the box and choose Delete.

A selected region on the bed showing corner and edge handles and the round rotate knob above it — The selected box: corner and edge handles, and the rotate knob on its stem.

Precision

Zoom & Pan the Bed

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For nudging a crop edge by a hair, get in close. The bed zooms to 800%.

Zoom in and out: hold ⌘ and scroll, or pinch the trackpad. The point under your cursor stays put.
Quick zoom: double-tap with two fingers to jump to 250% at the cursor; double-tap again to fit the whole bed.
Pan: once zoomed, plain scrolling moves around the bed in any direction.
The cluster: the − and + buttons step the zoom, the readout shows FIT or the current percentage, and the last button snaps back to fit.

The floating zoom cluster at the bottom right of the bed, reading FIT — The floating cluster at the bed’s bottom-right corner.

Detection

Auto-Detect, Locked or Manual

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Detect Regions finds every photo on the current preview and boxes each one, tilt measured, name assigned. It replaces whatever boxes are on the bed.
The lock beside it chooses when detection runs. Auto (the whole control glows amber) re-runs it after every preview, so a fresh bedful boxes itself. Manual leaves your hand-drawn boxes alone. The setting is remembered between launches.
Back sides too: with the draw side set to BACK, Detect Regions hunts for handwriting instead of photo edges, so it can box faint pencil notes on otherwise blank photo backs.

The Detect Regions control in the toolbar with its Auto lock lit amber — One control, two zones: run detection now, and choose Auto or Manual.

Auto-orientation

Sideways Photos Fix Themselves

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Lay photos any way they land. A neural network, 99.8% accurate in our benchmarks, checks each print and saves it right-side up.

The ↻ badge. A print lying sideways or upside down gets a badge under its name, like ↻180° AUTO, and previews upright on the bed itself. Sideways prints sit letterboxed over a blurred fill so you can see exactly what will be saved.
Trust it or veto it. Files save upright while the badge reads AUTO. Click the badge (or right-click the photo and choose “Keep original orientation”) to keep the photo exactly as it lies; click again to re-enable.
It knows when it is unsure. Below a confidence threshold the detector abstains and leaves the photo untouched rather than guessing.
Always current. Moving a photo or taking a new preview re-checks it, and the sidebar row shows the pending turn as an amber ↻ capsule.

A photo that was placed upside down shown corrected upright on the bed with a badge reading 180 degrees AUTO — This print was placed upside down; the bed previews it upright, and it saves that way.

Fronts & backs

Pairing Fronts With Backs

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Flip each photo where it lies and the app pairs by position automatically. These are the controls for everything else.

The draw side

The FRONT / BACK switch in the sidebar sets which side newly drawn (and newly detected) boxes belong to. Backs are cyan, wear a BACK keycap and a hatched fill, and pair to a front automatically by bed position.
Press ␣ Space to flip the selected box between front and back; with nothing selected, Space toggles the draw side itself.
The All fronts, All backs, and Clear chips under the region list convert or clear the whole bed in one click.

Two back-side regions on the bed with cyan dashed outlines, hatched fill, folded corners, and BACK keycaps on their name chips — Back sides are unmistakable: cyan, hatched, dog-eared.

Rewiring a pair by hand

Right-click a box and choose Link to front… (or Link to back…). A cord follows your cursor; click the partner to tie the pair. Esc cancels.
Or use the sidebar: click the FRONT / BACK capsule on any region row to flip its side or point a back at a specific front: another box on the bed, or one of your recently saved files.

Pairing mode

After you scan a batch of fronts and preview the flipped pile, Pair Backs in the toolbar opens a split view: the previous scan on the left, the new preview on the right, with each matched pair sharing a color. Gray means unmatched.
Hover a photo on the left to trace its link. Drag a cord from a left-hand photo onto a back on the right to re-pair them by hand. ALL LINKS traces every pair at once.

The sidebar draw-side switch set to FRONT with gesture hints listed beneath it — The draw-side switch, with the gesture hints right beneath it in the app.

Pairing mode: the previous scan's four fronts on the left bed and the four flipped backs on the right bed, each matched pair outlined in the same color, header reading 4 of 4 matched — Pairing mode with all four backs matched: each pair shares a hue across the two beds.

Output

Scanning & Your Files

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Preview is a fast, low-resolution pass over the whole bed. The physical button on the scanner itself triggers Preview too.
Scan N Regions makes one pass at full quality across the photos, then crops each box losslessly into its own file. A photo cropped out of a group scan is pixel-identical to scanning it alone.
Output settings: the filename base (scan by default), resolution up to your scanner’s full optical DPI, Color / Grayscale / B&W, the back-side suffix (_b by default), and the destination folder. Files save as high-quality JPEG with the true DPI embedded, so they open at their real physical size.
Saved means saved. Every saved region gets a green check on its bed label and its sidebar row, and the bed wears a green SCANNED seal once everything on it is captured. Move a photo or take a new preview and the marks clear, so a stale check can never lie to you.
LAST SAVE and HISTORY thumbnails at the bottom of the sidebar open the actual file when clicked.

The sidebar output settings: name, resolution, color mode, back suffix, and folder — The OUTPUT section of the sidebar.

Region rows in the sidebar showing green SCANNED checks, an amber auto-rotate capsule, tilt and size readouts — Region rows: green checks, the pending ↻ turn, tilt and true size.

The green SCANNED seal at the top right of the bed — The bed’s SCANNED seal.

Reference

Keyboard & Mouse Cheat Sheet

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`⌫ Delete`	Remove the selected box
`␣ Space`	Flip the selected box front ↔ back, or toggle the draw side
`Esc`	Cancel an in-progress link
`⇧ Shift` + rotate knob	Fine rotate, geared 8:1, no snapping
`⌥ Option` + drag	Draw a new box, even over the selected one
`⌘ Cmd` + scroll, or pinch	Zoom at the cursor, up to 800%
Scroll	Pan the bed while zoomed in
Two-finger double-tap	Zoom to 250%, or back to fit
Click again	Select the box underneath a stack
Right-click a box	Flip side, keep original orientation, link to a partner, delete

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Curious why the backs matter? See the FrontBack Scanner tour or read our scanning best practices.