Digitizing Old Photos

[1990C4S]

What do I need to buy do a good, or very good, job?

Or pay someone?

I have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos that I want done...

[Scott Douglas]

Are they slides or actual photographs you want digitized?

[Scott Douglas]

Here is what I used when I digitized old family slides:

[wdfifteen]

If they are photo prints a flatbed scanner will work, but cheap ones are SLOW. If you are going to scan thousands of photos with anything you better have a lot of free time to devote to it. Better to carefully sort and rank photos by desirability before you start. You may run out of time or interest after the first 100.
Get a photo editing app that will allow you to crop images. Load the scanner with as many prints as you can to make one big file, then crop them down to individual files with the software. This saves time.

[1990C4S]

I have 99% photos, dating from 1950 to 2010...slides are not too important.

I do not care about speed, I want a very good resolution...

Would a high resolution digital picture be superior to a scan???

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by 1990C4S

I have 99% photos, dating from 1950 to 2010...slides are not too important.

I do not care about speed, I want a very good resolution...

Would high resolution digital picture be superior to a scan???

What is your end use? Photographing a photo is a pain. I've done a lot of it. I had a non-glare pain of glass to put the print under so it was flat and small studio lights to illuminate it - I don't remember the color temperature. A photograph captures what is reflected off of the subject. The color of the light in the room and reflections on the print can make your photo look weird. A scanner takes care of all that.
Almost any flatbed scanner will give you adequate resolution if you are looking at the image on a screen at 100% If you are going to enlarge it, yep, resolution counts.

[Scott Douglas]

I would say yes, others may differ.

[1990C4S]

Originally Posted by Scott Douglas

I would say yes, others may differ.

Yes, the camera is the best option?

[jhc]

Originally Posted by 1990C4S

What do I need to buy do a good, or very good, job?

Or pay someone?

I have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos that I want done...

Get one of these:

https://epson.com/For-Home/Scanners/Photo-Scanners/FastFoto-FF-680W-Wireless-High-speed-Photo-and-Document-Scanning-System/p/B11B237201

then sell it after you are done.

[wdfifteen]

For offset printing we scan photos at 300 dpi and line work (text, etc) at 600. That is way more than you need if you are looking at the photo on a computer screen, but it would make a great print. How you copy the image would depend on the end use.

[Scott Douglas]

It was in my case because I had the camera and lens. I found the bellows used and made it work.

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by 1990C4S

I have 99% photos, dating from 1950 to 2010...slides are not too important.

I do not care about speed, I want a very good resolution...

Would a high resolution digital picture be superior to a scan???

Then you want to find the negatives and scan those - Richard's Photo in SoCal is used by many pros and will do a better job than nearly any DIYer.

If you have only a few of them you can DIY with a negative adaptor on a camera. They will be fine if you do it right but it is laborious. You need an even light source also.

If you only have prints then buy/rent a flat bed and do that - you need a flat bed scanner that has adequate resolution, which will be determined by the grain of the print (and the size). Inspect the prints with a loupe to see how grainy they are.

re the last question - depends - a high quality scanner (pro) will always do the best job

[masraum]

The good news is that if they are printed photos, then you can usually scan several on a flatbed scanner at once and it will save them as separate photos.

Many flatbed scanners also are able to scan negatives.

[URY914]

I scanned hundreds of prints for my flickr page. I used a scanner but it still is a slow process.

Check into using your phone's camera. You never know what may work.

[GH85Carrera]

I did that for a living for many years. The fist step is determine what is your end use, and I bet it is digital archive.

Hard drives are cheap, and I suggest you back up all the scans to multiple places, but that is another subject. Scan them at higher resolution than needed, it is easy to throw away resolution, but you simply can't bring it back from low resolution despite what TV detective TV shows say is possible.

When we cleared out my parents house I ended up with 5 or 6 large boxes of family photos. Most were labeled, and that helps. I spent untold hours scanning the prints. I ended up opening an account with Ancestry.com and built a family tree. I have a ton of photos that Ancestry.com can store forever, and other people building a tree can access my photos.

But back to scanning. Ignore the people saying 300 DPI (actually PPI) is all you need. It all depends on the size of the original print! More pixels is better, and hard drives storage space is just dirt cheap.


This is wallet size photo (2.25 x 3.25 inch) taken when my dad was just one year old.



I scanned the original at 1,200 PPI and the detail is amazing. If it was an 8x10 you don't likely want a 1,200 PPI scan, just 300 is fine for larger prints unless you plan to "zoom in" on faces in a large group photo.

Another BIG tip, is scan the images "flat" or with low to very low contrast. Once again it is super easy to add contrast, but a high contrast scan will never be made low contrast. Try to get detail in the shadows and the highlights in the scan, and then tweak the contrast and density with a photo editing program.



I have been using Photoshop since it was Aldus PhotoStyler and Adobe bought it and merged it into Photoshop. I love Photoshop since I know it. It is expensive and complex to learn, but it is the industry standard. Other programs can do what you need, and a scanner may well come with a program to edit the photos.

Back to Ancestry.com, they will keep my family tree "in the cloud" on their servers forever. I have had many distant cousins thank me for posting photos of their long long great grand uncle, or adding in the information to fill out a tree. I have the app on my phone, I can look up my tree anytime.

I also still have my original scan on my RAID 5 drive.

Have fun with the scan project.

[GH85Carrera]

Using a camera is a great "down and dirty" way to capture the image especially if you can shoot in RAW mode. The issue with most cameras is it will add a lot of contrast. The shadows go super dark, and loose all detail, and the highlights tend to blow out or get whiter and no detail. If you can capture an image that looks good, and not have reflections from the lights, it can be a quicker way to do it. Setting up the lights to get no reflections, and have even light, and the proper color of light can be a challenge.

[Baz]

I just scan them with my regular HP printer, which also works as a scanner.

I use the settings that are recommended by a Google search.

I think they come out OK and certainly good enough for my purposes.......

[Bill Douglas]

I used an ordinary flatbed HP scanner. It worked very well. I also scanned in lots of things like birth, marriage, death certificates. My grandad had typed up a lot of information that he had put a lot of research into so that was scanned as well into jpg pages.

I produced a whole lot of CDs and mailed them out to any and all extended family members. The game plan being the information was in more place than one so safe. Also so my evil cousins didn't borrow the collection of stuff and not return it.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

But back to scanning. Ignore the people saying 300 DPI (actually PPI) is all you need. It all depends on the size of the original print! More pixels is better, and hard drives storage space is just dirt cheap.

Most printers can only print 300 dpi (dots per inch = color rosettes per inch) so why scan to a higher resolution?
As you and I both said, you base the resolution of the scan on the final use of the image.

[GH85Carrera]

Another advantage of a flatbed scanner of a camera is slightly curved prints. If the print has a curl to it, it is really hard to photograph. A scanner flattens it against the glass.

Baz your first scan may will be just the original photo, but notice how the white paint is just total white with no defined shape, and the shadows in the interior are just black areas with no detail. That is high contrast. If the print was from an original slide it is very typical of the process, and no scanner could fix it.