Have come to the conclusion that using a service is the best way to go. Any recommendations/experiences? I am most interested in high quality, high resolution images. Bonus points if the photos can be organized in some way.
I found a local business to digitize ours because I was not comfortable sending the photos through the mail or UPS. She picked them up from our house and delivered them back, plus spent about 30 minutes helping me load them on the computer and showing me how the files were organized.
I spent a lot of time organizing the photos before the scanning. I grouped them by event and lined up all the photos in shoes boxes, in date order. I placed index cards between the groupings and wrote on the card what it was. For example April 1995 DisneyWorld, July 1993 DS 4th birthday, Christmas 1999. When the woman scanned the photos, she named the files based on what I wrote on the index cards.
I have no idea if this was the best way to do it, but it gave me some form of organization so I can go back and find what I want. The time I spent prepping for the scan enabled me to throw out duplicate and bad pics. She said the job went very well because all the pictures were neatly arranged and ready for the scanner. I filled 2 large shoe boxes with just the photos stacked front to back.
Once the thumb drive was loaded on my computer, I have the photos backed up on the cloud and an external hard drive. And for one more level of protection, I put the thumb drive in our safe deposit box. It was a big job, but well worth it.
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I also used a local photo shop to digitize our photos. I put them in chronological order as best I could, they gave me everything on a thumb drive which I uploaded to Amazon Photo. I also had them digitize some old 8mm home movies that my grandfather made. Happy I did this, but it wasn’t cheap!!
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Excellent, thank you. I don’t think there’s a local service near me but I will look. The national services all have good reviews, but they also have bad ones.
Uts priceless but how much did it cost you?
Amazingly I found my invoice for the service - total was $1350. For just scanning, the cost was $195 per shoe box (I forgot I had 3 boxes) plus some oversized photos that were done separately. Then I opted for an organizing service so that each of my 331 events were created in different folders named for the event. Then each photo in the group was named with the folder and a sequential number. That charge was $720.
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$1350!! Holy Crap!!! I did it all myself and was more than happy with the results—granted, I had the time to do it.
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It was well worth it to me, plus the scanning quality is better than I can do at home. I thought $200/shoe box was not a bad price. The real cost was in the file organization and I would never find the time to do that.
A family member did this with family pictures. There are over a thousand pictures on a flash drive. I’m quite sure I won’t look at those any more often than the box of prints. Actually since I have culled the box of prints, it is small, and I do look at the pics.
This relative would also like all of the family to look at all the pics and put comments on an excel sheet created for this. I can guarantee, that’s not going to happen.
But the tiny flash drive takes up a less space.
I had this same dilemma (how to transfer photos & videos) about 2 years ago, and never moved forward, primarily overwhelmed by the cost or the time. If you’re also interested in video transfers, there was a lot of great advice on a past CC thread: Copying OLD VHS tapes
Our library has a high quality scanner (prints or slides), but you can only reserve about 45 minutes each month due to popularity. Closed during Covid as well. I could only scan about 24 slides per session. They also have a video scanner but it takes the same time to transfer as the original – so only 45 minutes of a 2 hr. video.
I finally gave a local company 2 of my video tapes. About $50 for the transfer to a thumb drive. It had some great short memories of the children at various points of their younger selves through high school (I had edited long ago when in video format), and of their grandparents. I gave the digital version to the children as gifts. They’ve never watched.
As mentioned on the above thread, I came to the conclusion (for now), that I’m not sure changing formats to digital will ever encourage viewing any more than the old photo albums. I may try to select a very very few photos to scan for archive reasons only – but then it will take hours to decide which!
My ultimate plan is to convert slides into digital photos so I can then make photo books. If my 91 year old father lives long enough for me to finish them I know he’d like to see pictures from the 1940’s - 1960’s including his brothers and sisters, who have since passed away, among others.
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We have scanned some of ours. You don’t have to have a super fancy scanner. I have a Canon Pixma TS9020 and have successfully scanned some small old photos and cleaned them up. Scan at a high resolution.
We used Scancafe and were pleased with the scans they did. They run sales all the time and you can often find discount coupons online with a web search. Back when we used them a few years ago they used to do much of their scanning in India but according to their website it’s all done in the USA now.
For many of the pictures we had the negatives along with the print and sent the negatives. It’s my understanding that you get more resolution when you scan the negatives.
On a few portraits and other pictures they offered a retouching service; they show you the original scan and the retouched one and then you decide if you want to buy the retouched one. I have Photoshop Elements but am a low-skill user (basically just lighten parts of the image that are too dark, the occasional cropping or fixing tilted pictures) and what they did was way past what I could have done.
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We gave up, it’s up to the kids to scan them when we’re gone. But we did sort the slides and kept about one box. I’m going through to see what I can throw out eventually. I didn’t want to spend the money and then they threw them away eventually.