Photo Scanner with Picture Studio with

Bought scanner to scan all my family photos. It’s very easy to connect and use. Scanner works fine and scans photos really fast. Software is also easy to figure out. Once the photo is in their system there is a decent amount of editing to the pics. I’m using it for some photos that have some moisture and bent ends. So far so good. This is a great tool to have and back up pics. The sharing on social is pretty cool

I really like this scanner! I’ve been using it for about two months without any issues. The scanner has a smooth design and takes up very little space next to my office desk. The instructions were clear and well-written, and my Windows system immediately detected the hardware, making the installation process quick and easy.One of the best features is the ability to scan, upload, and edit my old photos effortlessly. I had a lot of dated pictures, and the software handled them well, with the image quality being nearly perfect. In fact, some photos showed noticeable restoration improvements. As with any technology, the more you use it, the better you become at mastering its features, and this scanner is no exception!

Although the software install goes well and Windows can detect the scanner without issue, and any generic software can scan something. Their own PictureStudio software can't detect the scanner on my machine - again, despite it working fine in Windows. It wants either a scanner plugged in or a serial number and it refuses to see my own scanner.Contacted support twice and no response in over a week. Normally I wouldn't be so harsh on an item for bundled software, but Ambir spends 90% of its time on this page talking about how good the software is!On the hardware side. The unit is lightweight and USB powered which is really nice. Scan quality is typical of a modern scanner (decent at 600 dpi for most use) since nearly all of them use the same low-cost CIS tech instead of expensive CCDs.It somehow uses a mini USB connector on the scanner side in 2024 which screams "We have a 2010 controller board design that we don't want to update".

This review is about the Ambir Photo Scanner, which includes Ambir's PictureStudio software (current version 1.0.38.0). I am running this on a Windows 11 computer.I have, like many old people, boxes full of print pictures. I'd like to be able to share these with others, and I thought this scanner would make it possible. I knew it would be a long process, but I didn't anticipate how difficult it would be.I downloaded and installed the software. When I ran it, it said to plug in the scanner. I did so--it expects a USB-C port on your computer, but an adapter to the more common USB-A is provided. But when I first plugged the scanner in, the software said the scanner was not connected. I unplugged and re-plugged it in, and this time it found the scanner.Setup then instructed me to run a provided calibration sheet (they provide extras). The sheet went backwards and forwards for several minutes, and the program announced it was ready for my first scan. I selected a 5" x 3 1/2" photo from the stack and dropped it in to the tray in landscape orientation. My first picture scanned beautifully at 300 dpi, so I tried it at 600 dpi as a comparison; I can see the difference, but I'm not sure which I like better. That's good news, because the 300 dpi scan is (of course) significantly faster, taking only a few seconds. (See my first two photos.)So far so good, aside from the minor glitch. The next photo was portrait orientation, so I put it in the scanner that way. DISASTER. The picture would not go straight, but kept twisting sideways, and exited the scanner rotated nearly 90 degrees. The software had trouble analyzing the output, I guess, and all I got was a spinning circle. There doesn't appear to be any way to cancel the scan. I tried scanning the picture again, this time trying to guide it through the scanner with my fingers to keep it straight. This was not much better, and the software again sat there--now with two spinning circles. Nothing seemed to stop these spinning circles; right click does not bring up a menu, and none of the other commands seemed to stop it either. It seemed the only way to stop it from attempting to make sense of the scan was to exit the program (which fortunately remained responsive) and re-start it. (Actually, it turns out I could have pressed "Clear" to stop the circles.) This time the same picture passed through with only a little twisting, but the result was like an image in a fun show mirror, with straight lines twisted into curves. On the next try, I finally got the picture to pass through the scanner with minimal twisting, and the output looks good. My third and fourth photo show one of the twisted images, and the straight image.One of the items in the box is what appears to be a plastic sheet inside a plastic bag. It's not mentioned in the instructions, but the on-line support told me that this was a photo protector, intended for processing old pictures that might be damaged by the scanner. It's actually two sheets of plastic attached at one end. So I slipped the picture that had been giving me trouble into this sleeve and tried to run that through the scanner. But the sleeve got stuck, and actually tried to twist like the single photo had, even though the sleeve is about the same width as the path through the scanner. I gave up trying to use the sleeve.I think the issue with my photos that causes them to twist going through the scanner may be that they're sticky. They are forty years old, and even though they look good, they are slightly curled and tend to stick to each other. But that's precisely the sort of thing that a photo scanner should deal with. One solution would be a flat bed scanner (the one on my printer is unbearably slow). Another solution might be to have guides in this scanner's feeder that can be adjusted to keep different size photos straight (like the guides most printers have for different sizes of paper). That said, the plastic sleeve is close to the width of the scanner path, and as I mentioned it twisted despite the sides of the scanner path acting as guides.I also need to say a few things about the software that works with the scanner. There is no menu or even a ribbon; instead, controls are scattered around the program's window in what seems to me a haphazard way. (I can blame Microsoft Office, since despite having a ribbon that is supposed to house the controls, some things--like the zoom control or the styles--are scattered as buttons in other places. But that shouldn't mean everyone ought to repeat Microsoft's mistake.) And some of the buttons don't seem to work until you've done something else--but they're not grayed out. For example, there's a button labeled "Share", but all it does initially is to pop up a message saying "Click here to go to settings to configure social and cloud accounts." But I *did* click "here", and all I got was this message. Apparently to configure sharing, you instead go to the "Settings" button (on the other side of the program's window) and scroll the available settings down to the hard-coded list of seven social media sites, where you can configure, enable or disable each site. Except the toggle to enable/ disable a site can't be used until you configure that site (you instead get the enigmatic message "Please configure from setting"). Once you've enabled at least one sharing site, then clicking on that "Share" button allows you to choose which site to share a photo through.I also can't figure out where the scanned pictures are stored. There is no way in the program's Settings to set a default location. The Ambir app can find them, but what if I want to use some other application, like Microsoft's File Explorer or IrfanView, to manage my pictures? The app does provide a "Save" button which allows you to copy the files from Ambir's albums to whatever location you want, but so far as I can tell you have to do this one scanned photo at a time. The scanned pictures are shown in each album in a sort of thumbnail view. You can mouse on one to select it, but neither Control-Mouse nor Shift-Mouse allows you to select more than one, and the cursor keys don't change your selection at all. There is a control (not quite a button) next to an album that allows you to "Select All" the pictures in an album, but that doesn't affect the "Save" button, which still only allows saving a single photo.One of the things created in the Windows Start Menu is "Ambir Photo Scanner Support" (the program itself is called "PictureStudio"). I clicked on this, which takes me to https://ambir.com/Support-Ambir --a page which turns out not to exist on the ambir.com website. Fortunately, it's not hard to find the actual support page from there, but this highlights the issue of hard-coding URLs and other ephemeral things. I've already mentioned that the software hard codes seven (counting email) social media sites. While those places will probably be around for awhile, new sites will be created, and there is no simple way to upload files from this program to them. I am not a significant social media user, but some of the sites that are not hard coded into PictureStudio are Imgur, Instagram, iCloud and Shutterfly. In my opinion, the right way to fix this would not be to hard code every social media site in the world into PictureStudio, but to allow the user to add new sites.To summarize , I found both the hardware (the scanner) and the software to be frustrating to use. I'll probably continue to work with them, and see if it gets better, but for now it's nowhere near as easy as I had hoped it would be.Addendum: It turns out IrfanView (a free popular photo viewing and editing program) can detect the Ambir scanner. With PictureStudio closed, I dropped a picture into the scanner, told IrfanView to select "PictureStudio Photo Scanner" as the scanning source, set it for 300 dpi color and a few other adjustments, and started scanning. IrfanView has an advantage in that it can put the pictures in whatever directory on my computer I want them; it does not support tagging etc., but there are probably other apps I could use for that. IrfanView (or some other free scanner/ photo editing software) may be the way I end up using this scanner.

I bought this scanner to deal with a large amount of old photos from my family. The scanner worked exactly as advertised. I scanned about 150 photos into the software which was pretty easy to use. It had a few areas that initially confused me but i figured it out pretty fast. You can color photos and do some other basic edits and improvements to them. I haven't connected my social sharing yet but will be doing so. This is a great tool as I was worried about losing these pictures.