If you’ve been following along you know that I am on a mission! I want everyone to know how easy it is to get digital copies of all of their old photographs. I have found that very few people have a back up of their photographs. People have told me they didn’t realize how easy it was or that there were even options to get digital scans using your phone. So I’m here to share the word! It’s time for everyone to get their old photographs digitized and I’m here to help!
After Hurricane Ian devastated my area I began helping flood victims to try to save their damaged photographs. As a professional photographer with a degree in photography and many years of experience I had a few skills that came in handy in this situation. So I began helping people who had survived some very tragic circumstances.
I would meet people at their flooded home and I’d see everything they owned in a pile on the curb. Some were pummeled with over 12 feet of water that had come into their homes and literally destroyed almost everything. However even with every item they owned in the trash and so many of their own memories gone they would still desperately ask me to help them save their photographs. Their most valuable possession many would say.
I helped as many people as I could. Thousands of pictures came through my home and I worked tirelessly to save them. There were also many that couldn’t be saved. Pictures I couldn’t restore, even pictures that just washed away forever, so many gone and so many people crushed by that painful loss.
It was after that experience that I made it my mission to help everyone to get a secure back up of all of their old family photos. The hardest part of watching people in tears with their destroyed photographs is knowing that this could have been prevented. Now I’m teaching people everyday the methods they can use to prevent photo disaster and have digital copies of their photos to enjoy!
Here is my list of photo digitizing methods that you can use starting today!
A phone app. Yes. there are literally apps that you can download that are used for digitizing photographs. Those apps work better than just taking a cell phone pictures because a scanning app will correct the perspective and give you a better quality image. Some even color correct and my favorite app, Photomyne, even adds color to black and white photographs.
Popular photo scanning apps:
Scanner. Google the word scanners and you’ll find a never ending list of home scanners. As a general rule these machines will produce a higher quality image than what you get from an app. Meaning that if you want to reprint the photo later, you can likely print it much larger and still have a good quality image. The downfall of these scanners is that there is a much higher investment and they tend to take more time to scan a photo. There is one fast scanner that is intended just for this project though, it’s the Epson FastFoto scanner. It’s my favorite and go to for getting a good quality scan. You can literally send stacks of photographs through the scanner and within minutes have those pictures on your computer.
I love this scanner because it has a photo feeder. It allows you to scan stacks of photographs at one a time. I have found it to be the quickest and easiest way to get digital copies of old photographs and to get photo organized!
Hire a service. You have outsourced the plumbing repair and the new roof. You know there are times when a professional just needs to be called in. If this is a project that is going to be put in the maybe someday pile I implore you to consider just sending those pictures off. At the end of the day it’s done. After Hurricane Ian I talked with dozens of people who brought me pictures that were in that “when I get to them” pile. I know they each regret not getting those digital back ups. And I know every single one would have just hired a service and had them digitized for them if they could go back. So if you don’t have digital copies of those old photographs and you know that it’s a “someday” project maybe sending those pictures off is the solution. Check out these photo scanning services:
AND be sure and subscribe on YouTube. I am working on a new post right now with even more great tips on getting those digital scans!