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, shown the way it works in the app: fixing a missed photo with a double-click, stitching a print bigger than the glass, splitting a folder of scans you already have, zooming in on the bed, rewiring a front-and-back pair by hand, and the shortcuts that make a big session fly.
Orientation
The Window at a Glance
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, start number, 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
Auto-detect draws the boxes for you, but every box stays fully hand-editable.
Precision
Zoom & Pan the Bed
For nudging a crop edge by a hair, get in close. The bed zooms to 800%.
Detection
Auto-Detect, Locked or Manual
The Detect Regions control
- 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.
Missed one? Double-click it.
- Double-click the spot. On the current preview, double-click the bed right where the print lies (or right-click it and choose Find photo here).
- It hunts right there. FrontBack re-detects at that exact spot, which catches the pale, faded prints a full-bed pass can miss.
- You always get a box. If nothing is found with confidence, a standard box lands on your click, ready to adjust: still faster than drawing one.
- Already boxed? It selects the existing box instead of doubling it up.
Auto-orientation
Sideways Photos Fix Themselves
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.
Fronts & backs
Pairing Fronts With Backs
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.
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.
Oversized mode
Photos Bigger Than the Glass
An 11 × 14 portrait, a school panorama, a mounted album page: Oversized in the toolbar stitches them together from overlapping passes, and the seam disappears.
Click Oversized in the toolbar, lay any section of the print on the glass, press Preview, then Scan & Stitch. The first pass anchors the photo.
Shift the print to its next section, keeping 1 to 2 inches overlapping (more for thick prints), and press Preview again.
The new section drifts in as a ghost and locks onto the stitch, even laid back crooked or turned. Drag, nudge, or Turn it yourself if you like, then Scan & Stitch.
Finish & Save writes one seamless, full-resolution photo. For an album page, Chop It Up cuts each mounted photo into its own file instead.
| Drag the ghost | Place the incoming section by hand; it snaps from wherever you leave it |
| Arrow keys | Nudge the ghost (⇧ = coarse) |
| R / ⇧R | Turn the incoming section 90° |
| ⏎ Return | Scan & Stitch the aligned section |
| Re-align | Search the whole photo again and return to the best match found |
| Undo Pass / Start Over | Remove the last stitched pass, or discard them all |
Passes are exposure-matched and feathered where they meet, so the join vanishes. Leaving Oversized keeps your stitched passes until you finish or start over.
Files instead of the glass
Splitting Scans You Already Have
Open a whole-bed image, or a folder of them, and every region tool on this page works on the file exactly as it works on the glass. No scanner has to be connected.
File ▸ Open Bed Scan… (⌘O) takes one image or several. Open Folder of Bed Scans… (⇧⌘O) takes a whole folder. Or just drag files, or a folder, onto the window: it outlines itself when the drop will land.
Detection runs on each file as it loads if the Auto lock is on, and Detect Regions runs it by hand otherwise. Draw, move, rotate, delete, double-click to find a missed print: every gesture above still applies.
The Scan button becomes Split N Photos & Next (⏎ Return). Each box is cut from the original at full resolution, saved upright and numbered, and the next scan in the queue opens with its photos already boxed.
The toolbar reads FILES 3 OF 40; its menu opens different files or hands the app back to the scanner. The ‹ and › arrows step through the stack, and boxes you adjusted are waiting when you come back to a file.
Your originals are read-only. FrontBack opens them and writes new files into the output folder you chose. If a photo it is about to save would land on one of the source scans, it stops and says so rather than overwriting it.
Crops come from the original pixels. Nothing is resampled, and the file’s own DPI tag rides along, so the crops open at their real physical size. Resolution and color mode belong to the scanner and sit this one out; name, numbering, format, and output folder work as always.
Backs pair the same way. Split a sheet of fronts, then open the sheet of backs: set the draw side to BACK (or use All backs) and each one matches its front by position and saves as _b. Pair Backs opens its split view over the two files.
Auto-orientation still runs on every front, badge and veto included, so sideways prints inside an old scan come out upright.
A folder is one stack, not an archive sweep. You get the images sitting directly inside it, in natural filename order. Sub-folders are left alone.
Oversized stitching needs the scanner, so it steps aside while files are open. Return to Scanner hands back your live preview and the boxes you had on it, untouched.
| ⌘O | Open a bed scan, or several |
| ⇧⌘O | Open a folder as an ordered queue |
| Drag onto the window | The same, straight from the Finder or File Explorer: files or a folder |
| ⏎ Return | Split this scan and load the next |
| ‹ / › | Step back and forward through the queue |
| FILES n OF m | Open different files, or return to the scanner |
This is the fast lane for a big collection: hundreds of old whole-bed scans, split one after another, with nothing to click between files but Split.
Output
Scanning & Your Files
- Preview is a fast, low-resolution pass over the whole bed. The scanner’s own physical button triggers it too.
- Scan N Regions makes one full-quality pass, then crops each box losslessly into its own file, pixel-identical to scanning that photo alone.
- Output settings: filename base, start number, resolution up to full optical DPI, Color / Grayscale / B&W, the back suffix (
_b), and the folder. JPEGs embed the true DPI, so files open at their real physical size. - Numbering picks up where the folder leaves off. Each front takes the next free number after the highest
name_NNNNfile there. Moved finished photos out? Type the next number (say137) into Start. Files still in the folder are never overwritten: whichever is further along wins. - Saved means saved. Saved regions get green checks, and the bed wears a SCANNED seal once everything is captured. Move a photo or re-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.
Reference
Keyboard & Mouse Cheat Sheet
| ⌫ 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 |
| Double-click empty bed | Find the photo detection missed there and box it |
| Right-click a box | Flip side, keep original orientation, link to a partner, delete |
| Right-click empty bed | Find photo here |
| R / ⇧R · oversized | Turn the incoming section 90° |
| ⏎ Return · oversized | Scan & Stitch the aligned section |
| Arrow keys · oversized | Nudge the ghost (⇧ = coarse) |
| ⌘O / ⇧⌘O | Open a bed scan, or a whole folder of them, to split |
| Drag files onto the window | Open dropped images, or a dropped folder, as a queue |
| ⏎ Return · files | Split the open scan and load the next in the queue |
Now Point It at the Shoebox
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Curious why the backs matter? See the FrontBack Scanner tour or read our scanning best practices.
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