The Best Ways to Digitize Your Old Photo Collection
I come from a family that collects old photographs, which means my mom’s basement is full of huge plastic photo containers, and the collection only grows over time. Some of the photographs are a hundred years old and feature people we have never met before. Most of the photos are decades old and feature distant relatives eating cake or accidentally blinking when the flash goes off.
We hardly ever look at them, but they take up so much space and that’s why my mom decided last year she’d had enough. She wanted them to leave the house and asked me to help her. We decided to go through them once, looking for anything really important, discard the vast majority and digitize something decent. Here’s what we learned along the way.
Decide which photos to keep
Whether you decide to send your photos to a digitizing company or upload them all yourself, this will help you work with as little volume as possible. Just as I recommend holding a memorial night to go through old items before throwing them away, I recommend going through your physical photos before digitizing them. In practical terms, this will help you cut down on duplicates, throw out anything you don’t need, and only keep what’s truly worth keeping. On a more pleasant note, you can have a lot of fun and make great memories by reliving the past for one night – that was the point of holding on to them in the first place.
When I sort through photos, I divide them into two piles: toss and digitize. However, every now and then I’ll take a quick photo of one with my phone so I have it right away if I need it. It’s easy to get sentimental and make excuses for why you need to keep every photo for one reason or another, but try to be pragmatic. You won’t look at them often in the future. There’s no point in keeping five photos of your grandpa watching a football game or your toddler visiting an aquarium you don’t even remember. Choose only the most important things to keep, think a little about the things you throw away, and move on. My personal rule is that I choose one photo from each event – birthday, vacation, ceremony, etc. – and make sure it’s the best one. The rest must leave.
My best advice is to do it on a completely random night. Don’t do this on a day when you are feeling sentimental or nostalgic, and especially don’t do it on the day of something important that happened in the past, such as the birthday or death of someone who will appear in the photographs. a lot of.
Digitizing photos yourself
If you want to solve this problem yourself, you have two options: a photo scanner or an app on your phone. If you decide to purchase a scanner, purchase something that will go through the stacks quickly. PC Mag recommends the Epson FastFoto FF-680W , but keep in mind that this thing costs $599.99.
It’s also a robust document scanner that can create searchable PDFs, so if you’re looking to upgrade your scanner and are looking for something to digitize your photos, this might be what you need. Others on the market are cheaper, like the Plustek Photo Scanner ePhoto Z300 ($199), but you’ll have to manually upload the photos one by one, which may not work if you have entire family history memories to upload.
No matter what type of scanner you use, I recommend creating a Google Photos account to keep all your photos in one place. If you want to make your photos available to a wider group of people, it’s best to create a separate account, such as [your last name] [email protected] . I like Google Photos because it’s searchable and easy to customize. It recognizes faces (making it easy to highlight or hide certain people ), you can create folders and add details, and it’s free and easily accessible on multiple devices.
Naturally, for digitizing photos on your phone, I recommend the Google PhotoScan app, as it uploads your scans directly to the Google Photos library. However, this is time-consuming: you may have to take multiple photos, which will then be combined to get the best digitization, so you will have to go through each photo one by one. If you need an app that will scan multiple photos at once, Photomyne is your best bet, but you’ll have to pay $199.99 up front for a 10-year plan. You can then save all the photos individually and upload them to any cloud service or device you want.
Photo digitization services
I didn’t say it was a cheap venture; All I’m saying is that this is an important step towards getting your home in order and upgrading your accounting. Scanners and apps cost money, as does shipping your photos to a service that will digitize them for you, but the lack of hassle can be worth it.
iMemories is a service that charges $0.99 per photo (but often runs specials so you can pay as little as $0.49). You can then pay $7.99 per month or $49.99 per year for access to iMemories Cloud full of your media files, $39.99 for an 8GB USB drive, or $19.99 for a DVD or Blu-ray with photos. Downloading them after scanning is free.
You can also try ScanMyPhotos , which also often offers specials, but typically charges $229.98 per box of photos you submit. They estimate that each box contains about 1,800 photographs. Higher quality results will cost you another $150, and you’ll pay more the longer you want your download link to work before it expires.
Obviously, none of this comes cheap either, so it’s important to sort through your stack of photos before you send them all. But it’s better than having stacks of photos collecting dust and being useless in the attic.