How to Digitize and Share a Ton of Old Family Photos?
Welcome to yet another week of Tech 911 , Lifehacker’s advice column designed to answer your most pressing and unusual technology questions. This week we’re answering a question from someone looking to find a reliable photo storage service for a special project. I’ll let Lifehacker reader Joel explain:
“My mom passed away recently. I have hundreds of old family photos of ours, many of which are over 100 years old, and would like to scan them and create a secure cloud gallery searchable for my large family by topic or name. I have a decent scanner; what software should i use for cloud gallery? “
First, I’m sorry for your loss, Joel. I think it’s great that you are creating an incredible archive of your many family photos. While it may take you a while to set up and process, I think you (and future generations) will be happy to have it, especially if someone can easily access it with a simple hyperlink, and especially if it’s available for searching. I want my family to think about this, as I feel that in fact I only have passages and fragments of our story in the text, which does not affect so much.
I know you didn’t ask about the scanning process, but I wanted to check and see what you did to actually get digital copies of these photos? I feel like this is a “you get one chance” deal because you probably don’t want to go through the hassle of re-scanning hundreds of photos if something goes wrong. first time.
I would recommend not using any apps or features to scan photos on your smartphone or tablet – the quality is incompatible with what you are trying to do and it will take forever to take the pictures (not to mention cropping everything you need crop, ensure correct lighting, adjust the photo when colors look washed out, etc.).
Given that you are probably interested in getting the highest quality digital images you can get, I would consider researching your area for a photo or scanning store that can process your images for a reasonable fee. There are also many online services that can help you as well, if you don’t mind parting with your images for a while. (The two I linked are Wirecutter ‘s top recommendations after evaluating the scan speed and quality you’ll get from a lot of different services.)
If you want to do better, you can also opt for a dedicated photo scanner and do it yourself. Wirecutter loves the Epson FastFoto FF-680W , which is an expensive autofocus, but worth it if you see yourself doing it over and over, especially if family members are impressed with your first archiving session and want you to help them get some of their others. old photos on the Internet.
As for the cloud gallery part of your question, I would start by thinking about how you plan to preserve the original versions of these digital scans . Resist the urge to keep them on the same laptop or desktop, even if that means you can use a third-party service like BackBlaze to protect them if your hardware goes down.
Instead, consider some kind of redundant network storage (like one hard drive that automatically mirrors the contents of the second, or a more complex RAID with parity, etc.). Although, to be honest, you can also probably manage to just place the files on multiple external drives (at least on the primary and backup).
However, it will be a little more expensive and still won’t protect you in the event of theft or other home disasters that could affect the physical drives themselves. I suggest that you store the original versions of these files elsewhere – like Amazon Glacier, which costs very little per cloud storage (per gigabyte). Depending on the size of your photo archive, you might even get free cloud storage . (Google Drive with 15 free gigabytes might be your best bet.)
As with a physical backup, I would recommend storing the original scanned images of your photos in multiple (free) locations if possible, which will give you some peace of mind if one of them ever mysteriously disappears. If your archive is too big for that, just pay for one trusted service and be done with it – don’t break your money on this task, especially if you can double and store your photo archive offline.
Depending on which one you choose, you can take all of your photos and re-upload them to a more shared, searchable gallery. The first recommendation that comes to mind is good old Google Photos because it’s easy to use and you get unlimited storage for photos up to 16MP (4920 by 3264 pixels).
(This is why I recommend that you back up your originals elsewhere; if your photos are larger than 16MP, you don’t want Google to “help you” by shrinking them.)
You can organize the photos you upload to Google Photos into albums, and I’ve always loved the power of facial recognition to help you organize your photos and find people quickly. You can even edit where and when the original photos were taken if you know this information.
It’s easy to create and share albums in Google Photos, especially if you’ve already started a family on your Google account.) The security aspect is simple too. If you invite a Gmail user to an album, only they can see it. (If you invite someone who doesn’t use Gmail, they’ll receive a sharing link that in theory could be copied to anyone, but who will?)
Another option is Amazon cloud. If you are an Amazon Prime user, you get free unlimited photo storage on their service while you are a subscriber. You won’t have any file or image size restrictions , but your digital archive will go away if you ever get rid of Prime. It’s a smart option if you think you’re going to stick with Amazon for a long time, but I would go with a service that will always be free and unlimited – at least unless Google makes some major changes.
If you want more exciting features – like more options for tagging and organizing – you can opt for a simple Lightroom subscription. It’ll set you back $ 10 a month, but you get access to an awesome app for managing giant batches of images. As part of your subscription, you also get 1 TB of cloud storage on Adobe servers. However, the same caveat as before; you will have to pay to maintain this, so if you want to create an archive that your family can view at any time (for an unlimited period), a free service like Google Photos is best.