I don’t know about negatives but I’ve done this recently with slides. You don’t require an app for slides, or at least, I didn’t. I read a suggestion that it was fairly easy to copy slides just using your iPhone and a suitable light source. I quickly tracked down a small light box, about the size of a small paperback book. I then tried placing a 35mm slide in the corner of this little light box and put my iPhone on a couple of books with the camera part jutting out, so as to have the phone lens at the right distance above the slide to fill the frame with it. This, I soon discovered, meant that there was too much light, resulting in flare, so I cut a piece of black card to mask the rest of the screen of the lightbox. This worked very well, and of course, I made small adjustments to the height of the books, etc. as I went along.
The pictures look good, although because of the wide angle of the main camera lens on the iPhone, the edges can be a bit soft. I copied all the slides from my collection that I wanted to keep and then took all of them to the waste disposal site. Some of the scans have dust and marks on them from decades of storage but apart from removing the loose dust with an air blower, there wasn’t much I could do about that except clone out the worst marks from the scans using Apple Photos. Anyway, these aren’t going to be entered into any competitions, they’re just for me. Total cost about £12/$15 for the light box. Attached is an example - a Yangtze riverboat in China, 1995. Straightforward scan with the iPhone, no post processing. Just a small email-size file but you can see that the procedure works. As I said, pictures tend to be soft at the edges (as well as dusty, see hair at left edge of this one!) but I think that’s a small price to pay for having digital records of hundreds of old pictures, achieved in a week or so of spending the occasional hour at my desk. Have fun - I enjoyed doing this.
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