Shoeboxes of old photos may hold your family’s history and memories, but they’re difficult to preserve, share, organize, and back up. The best way to solve this problem is to digitize your old photos. It’s easy to do at home using a really good scanner, which can cost as little as about $65, or the scanner bed on an all-in-one printer, if you already have one. You can also mail your photos to a company that digitizes them for you and then sends them back when they’re done.
When you turn print photos into digital files, you have them right at hand when you need them. That way, you’ll be able to find, share, and print any picture in minutes.
Let’s look at these two options: hiring a company to digitize your photos and doing it at home. Both options have pros and cons. If you decide to do it yourself, keep reading for a few tips from pros on how to get the best results.
Keep in mind that you can use both options in tandem. For example, if you have some photos that you want scanned right away, you can do it at home while sending the rest of your collection out to a professional scanning service.
Hiring a Photo Scanning Service
Plenty of companies can scan your photos for you. Usually, it works like this: You mail your images to the company, and they take some time to scan them. Once your images have been digitized, the company sends you a link or a login to an account where you find all the digital copies of your pictures. Sometimes you have an option to purchase a DVD or USB drive with your images on them, too. At the end of the process, the company mails the original photos back to you.
Some benefits of using a photo scanning service are:
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Professional results
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Convenience, sometimes with the companies even supplying the shipping materials
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Someone else does the tedious work of scanning each image
Some cons of using a photo scanning service are:
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Risk of damage or loss when sending original photos through the mail
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Cost; while some companies advertise a low per-photo rate, you might find the total cost much higher once you read the fine print about volume pricing, additional fees for retouching, and other charges
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Time because it could take months before you get your original images back, depending on the size of your collection and how backed up the company is with orders
We at PCMag have not tested photo scanning services and therefore cannot recommend any per se. A few well-known companies, however, include GoPhoto and ScanCafe, which specialize in digitally repairing images that have been damaged, and ScanMyPhotos, which is known for offering low-cost scanning.
Scanning Your Photos at Home
If you’d rather keep the job in-house, you certainly can digitize your photos at home.
Some of the benefits of doing it at home are:
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No risk of putting your originals in the mail
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You have total control over the results
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It’s easy to prioritize which images to scan first
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You can save money
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You can easily name and organize your images as you scan them
Some of the cons of scanning images at home are:
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It’s time-consuming (although the more you do it, the faster it goes)
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Some equipment is required, listed below
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You need to have some level of comfort learning the skills to not only scan images, but also fixing them through color correction, cropping, and so forth
Let’s look at what the process of scanning your photos at home entails.
How to Scan Photos at Home
1. Gather Your Equipment
All the equipment you need comes down to three items, plus two optional ones. They are:
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A flatbed scanner
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A clean microfiber cloth, like the kind that comes with eyeglasses, or a handkerchief
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The software that came with your scanner
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Optional: Compressed air
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Optional: Photo editing software.
As mentioned, you can buy an inexpensive photo scanner or use an all-in-one printer that has a scanner bed. Canon CanoScan LiDE 400 won an Editors’ Choice and costs less that $100.
What if you can’t afford or don’t have room for a scanner? Don’t worry, you can still get acceptable results if you read our story on how to scan old photos with your phone.
2. Take Inventory and Define Your Project
Now that you have your equipment ready, you need to take inventory of your photos and define your project. Doing so will help you break it down into smaller parts to make it more manageable.
How many photos do you want to scan? Divide your project into sessions so that you never have to scan more than about 15 photos in one sitting. As you become comfortable with the process, this number might increase.
Decide which photos you want scanned first. Separate your images into groups that you’ll work through.
3. Clean the Scanner Bed
To get the best scan, your scanner glass must be clean and dry. It’s best to get as good a scan as you can the first time around rather than rescan an image or try to touch it up in an editing program later.
Wipe off your scanner bed with a clean, dry microfiber cloth. If you don’t have one, a clean and dry handkerchief will do. Do not use paper towels or tissues. They leave debris and may even scratch the surface.
If the glass on your scanner has smudges, rub them gently with your dry cloth. If that doesn’t work, dampen a small piece of the cloth and try cleaning only the glass again. Let it dry completely before putting anything on it.
Once you start scanning images, wipe the scanner every so often with your cloth to keep it free of dust and other particles.
4. Dust Off the Photos
Just as your scanner bed must be clean to get the best scan possible, your photos must be clean, too. Use compressed air to blow any dust off your photos. Again, do not use paper towels or tissues. Never use water or cleaning fluids on your photos.
Tip: Don’t flatten creases! If your photos have physical creases, as the image above at left does, do not try to iron them out. It only causes more damage. Instead, gently lay the image flat and scan it as best as you can. You can edit out creases later. If all else fails, make a copy for yourself and then consider sending it and other problematic photos to a professional scanning service.
4. Almost Always Scan in Color
With very few exceptions, scan your photos in color. Sepia photos need the full-color setting enabled. Black and white images are fine with the color setting, too, unless they have been damaged by ink or tape marks or something else topical. In those instances, using grayscale may actually make it easier to edit the images and remove the marks later.
5. Scan the Images
Ready to scan? You can scan one image at a time, but a time-saving tip is to lay down multiple images with about a quarter inch of space separating them on all sides. You can crop them later into individual files.
I like to give my images a good file name right away to help me remember what each file contains. I rely on the year the photo was taken, plus other details, such as location or the person in the image. When you name your files intelligently while you scan them, it makes it easy to use them later in other photo projects.
6. Keep Technical Notes
Keep in mind that the first time you scan a batch of photos will likely take the most amount of time because you’re figuring out the best settings and software tools at your disposal. It took me almost an hour to scan a batch of eight pictures and get them all right. Once you get the hang of it, the process should go much more quickly.
As you figure out what works best, take notes. That way, if you wait a few weeks or months before scanning another batch of photos, you can refer to your notes to help you get the best results again.
Tips for Resolution and File Format
Now, let’s talk about a few technical details, like what kind of resolution and file format is best for saving your images. The resolution and file format you choose will depend on what you plan to do with the photos. If you’re not sure, go higher rather than lower.
My advice is fairly rudimentary, I know, so I asked M. David Stone, author of The Underground Guide to Color Printers, for more pointers. He said it really depends on what you intend to do with your images.
“The controlling factor is pixels per inch (ppi) in the image at the size you plan to display it or print it,” Stone said. “For an electronic display, such as a computer screen or projector, you get the best quality with a one-to-one correspondence between the pixels in the image and pixels in the display. If you’re going to show it full-screen on an SVGA (800 by 600) display, the best resolution for the image is 800 by 600 pixels.”
Stone says the best approach is to work backward. “Start with the image size you need, in pixels, consider how you’ll have to crop the original to fit in the right aspect ratio, measure the size of the cropped image, and then compute the resolution you need.”
Here are some simplified guidelines:
To create the best archives, scan at the highest optical resolution the scanner offers. “That’s optical resolution, not mechanical and not interpolated,” Stone explained. “Stay away from interpolated resolutions for photos. When you’re ready to use them, you can use an image editor to resample the image to a lower resolution. Don’t use the original high-resolution image, and let the printer or display decide which pixels to throw out.”
To create good archives, scan at 600dpi to TIFF. You can save disk space by scaling down to 300dpi, and your images will still look sharp, but it might not be sufficient if you intend to enlarge them later, like if you’re printing them at a larger scale.
To share photos online, scan them as you would any other image at high quality to make an archive copy, and then export them to 200dpi JPGs. The smaller image is better for posting online, emailing to friends, etc.
To print images via a photo printing service, use a copy that’s 300ppi. You may have to adjust this, however, depending on whether you will blow up the image or crop it. “Think in terms of the final size of the image. If you’re going to scan 4-by-6-inch pictures to print at 4 by 6 without cropping, 300ppi scans are all you need. If you’re going to print them at 8 by 10, or crop out part of the picture, you need higher resolution. You have to do the math to figure out what that is.”
Tips for Editing Your Images
You don’t have to be a pro with image editing software to improve your photo scans. Here are some tips for making your digital photos look a little better.
Crop and Straighten
If you do nothing else, crop and straighten your images. It fixes a majority of problems with photos that were manually scanned. Nearly any image editing software will let you do it.
Edit for Color, Red-Eye, Creases
The next level of editing typically involves removing or correcting color, including crease lines and red-eye. To make those corrections, you need photo editing software, such as Photoshop.
Photoshop’s more-consumer-friendly counterpart, Photoshop Elements, is particularly good at image restoration, as is Corel PaintShop Pro.
PCs, Macs, and even Ubuntu computers include free image editing apps, and those are fine if you’re not planning to learn Photoshop or don’t want to pay for Elements or PaintShop. They have quick-edit buttons for correcting red-eye as well as blurring minor flaws in the images.
Editing out creases on photos takes some skill. If you know your way around Photoshop, try the content-aware Fill, Patch, Clone, and the Spot Healing Brush tools. Adobe’s Bryan Hughes has posted a helpful photo restoration video on the process. Otherwise, get help from a friend or a photo scanning service.
Keep Your Memories Safe
Digitized photos have several advantages over physical photos. You can organize them, back them up, create multiple copies, and share them easily. You can also print new copies at different sizes. If you plan on printing a lot, consider buying your own photo printer. A good one costs as little as $150-$200.
For more tips, PCMag camera analyst Jim Fisher has advice on how to preserve your photos, including how to create an archive of your files.
