If you want images now on a negative to be available on your iPhone there are a few ways to get there for low volume efforts.

I tried an iPics2Go portable scanner for the iPhone 4 and 4S recommended by Dan Burkholder in a recent workshop I attended (and will soon right about). The gizmo is on fire sale and costs less than $15 on Amazon. It looks like this:

The scan (after inverting in Photo Studio) looks like this:

It’s a little muddy. The copy on the box boasts high resolution picture scanning but I was only able to get a file of ~150KB.  I also tried the Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner I had written about before. Their gizmo originally offered on Kickstarter costs $50 on Amazon and looks like this:

The scan, inverted in the app, looks like this:

The colors are more saturated and the image is sharper. However, the file size is still really small at 155,928 total pixels and that includes all the white space.

If you know how to get a larger file size out of either of these scanners please do tell.

My next step will be to scan this negative using my Canon MG8120 for a 16MB resulting file, edit some in Photoshop on the large screen and then transfer to my phone for further editing.

What’s your strategy for scanning small numbers of negatives to your smart phone?