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Recreate your Polaroids for free

Though we have oft lamented the passing of Polaroid into photographic history, a new application called Poladroid allows you to recreate that nostalgic look and feel of the instant film for free.

Lexy Savvides Principal Video Producer
Lexy is an on-air presenter and award-winning producer who covers consumer tech, including the latest smartphones, wearables and emerging trends like assistive robotics. She's won two Gold Telly Awards for her video series Beta Test. Prior to her career at CNET, she was a magazine editor, radio announcer and DJ. Lexy is based in San Francisco.
Expertise Wearables, smartwatches, mobile phones, photography, health tech, assistive robotics Credentials
  • Webby Award honoree, 2x Gold Telly Award winner
Lexy Savvides

Though we have oft lamented the passing of Polaroid into photographic history, a new application called Poladroid allows you to recreate that nostalgic look and feel of the instant film for free.

Poladroids(Credit: CNET Australia)

Once installed, Poladroid places a hovering Polaroid camera over your desktop onto which you can drag and drop any digital photo to convert it into a "poladroid". As the photo emerges from the camera, it continues to develop in front of your eyes, just as Polaroid film does — and if you want to speed up the process even further, you can shake the picture from right to left using your mouse.

The program applies a range of effects such as vignetting and colour shifting to the image, and outputs the final picture in a square Polaroid frame. You can also halt development at any stage and save an image of your poladroid in the process; just click and save for that underexposed look.

To stay even more true to the original format, Poladroid only allows you to make 10 photos at a time — the same number of frames in a pack of Polaroid film.

Download Poladroid for free from poladroid.net or view some examples of poladroids on the flickr group page.