What to do with old photos?

[RunningBum]

The % of saved photos went up dramatically after I got to the ones with my kid in them. Close to 50% in that batch after getting rid of the duplicates. If I really want I can always cull them further another time. Next step is going to be to organize them by date and trip, and then I'll probably photograph them either individually or in groups. I figure I've got about 1000 or so (about a 10" stack). It was a lot of fun seeing the old pictures and remembering trips. Photographing them may be less fun. I may check out one of the scanning links people mentioned now that the size is reasonable, but I'll probably just take pics at my leisure.

Now, do I really toss the non-keepers, or do I just label the boxes as such, and shove them back on the top closet shelf? I'm probably going to do the latter so I can take one more pass through them another time, but if I never get to it, it'll be easy to toss them when I finally move or am gone. It's also nice to know that I've got the savers down to one box that I can grab in case of evacuation.

 

[meierlde]

Of course there is another advantage of scanning the photos if your house burns down and you have a flash drive located elsewhere, there is still a copy around. For some of the pictures my sister then created a book with one side of the families history.

 

[RunningBum]

Dreary freezing rain day has me inside, so I got a start on scanning, via a smartphone app, PhotoScan by Google. You take a photo, then hover over 4 different spots where it takes another photo and merges them to create a mostly glare free photo. Pretty slick! It uses google photos for storage, so it's easy to access if you're part of the google world.

I started with about 100 photos from a cruise I took with my 10 yr old son. About 25% turned out blurry, or didn't capture what the part of the picture I thought it would. I blame much of the blurriness on curled photos, and on the reshoot I put something over the corners to hold them down. In most cases I didn't want the entire photo anyway. There were still a few sticklers though, that for some reason chopped off part of the photo, as much as half sometimes. I had to shoot a couple 5 or 6 times. Pretty frustrating. Also, photo resolution is about 1/2 what I get with my scanner, using file size as my guide. It probably took me about 90 minutes to do. My phone was getting a little warm from the use and the light, and my back was a bit tired from hovering over the table where I was scanning. Looks like I have about 600-800 more, do I really want to spend another ~10 hours doing this?

I looked at a couple of other recommended apps, but neither seemed as simple to use. One of them, Shoebox, wants more to be a photo storage app. I could not find a way to get past letting them upload my photos to their cloud so I never even found their scanner feature.

I looked at outsourcing it. There are a couple local places, looks like it'd be around $150. ScanMyPhotos was recommended here. $145 for a box of 1000 photos from 3x3 to 8x11 size accepted, free shipping both ways. Thought about it. Noticed the groupon link someone posted, knowing it would be expired, but there was a new offer, ending today! My guess is that they run offers periodically, maybe even most of the time. $19 for up to 1000 4x6 photos, 300dpi. A little nervous about sending my photos off, but I decided to get it. Even if it was only for 4x6 photos. As it turns out, once you get the deal you can do any size up to 8x11 for another $18, which I may do when I see how many other size photos I have. You can also upgrade to 600 dpi, have them clean up the photos, etc, which is I guess how they get you, with these extras, but it's still better than their regular price.

Now I've just got to finish organizing the photos, consider adding some I'd rejected to get to the full 1000, and ship them off. And wait. And hope nothing goes wrong.

 

[mpeirce]

I've used ScanMyPhotos and had good luck with them. We did the box deal and it was a whole lot easier than doing the scanning myself.

I did have a handful of scans come back that had a single scan line messed up. I just rescanned those myself. I suppose I could have called them, but it's easy to scan a couple of photos.

I thought it was worth it.


They also do slides and I had good results. My scanner does slides, but they don't come out as crisp and clear as the ones I sent to ScanMyPhotos.

 

[SumDay]

UGH, this is what I get for being organized. I probably have 50 photo albums - 100 pics in each. So, this means whether I sent them to a service, or did it myself, I'd have to remove them from their sleeves, and then being an*l, I'd have to put them back in order.




The kids have asked that I digitize them - they don't want all those albums in their tiny apartments.


#FirstWorldProblems

 

[Freedom56]

We bought a film scanner a while back to scan negatives dating back to 1971. We are slowly archiving them on our home servers. The digital camera photos and videos are already on our servers. Eventually we will copy all photos and videos of our lives onto a high density memory storage devices and place them inside multiple water tight titanium canisters and bury them all over the world for a civilization long after the Eloi and Morlocks to discover. That's our plan.

 

[W2R]

I scanned 1,923 family photos back in 2012, using this photo scanner. Probably better scanners have become available since then.

Anyway, each day I scanned for maybe 2-3 or more hours until I got tired. I guess it took me about 5 days.

It is so good to have it completely done! I look at the scanned photos far more frequently than I looked at the paper photos, that were all dumped in a big box. They're still there, in the back of my closet but I am just saving them in case my daughter wants them some day.

The reason I didn't send them to a scanning service, is that I was concerned that these family photos would get lost or further damaged in transit. I felt they were safer here at home where they could not be lost, and being carefully scanned by yours truly. As soon as I scanned them, I copied all the scans on SD cards and sent one to each of three other family members. So now, they have the photos too.

 

[Katiek]

I scanned a ton of old family pics when my Mom moved. She felt bad her new place didn't have room for all her old pictures. I scanned them and got a digital photo frame so now she can see them all (one at a time). It was a lot of work initially, but worth the effort.

 

[RunningBum]

They are scanning at 300dpi. Should I pay $38 extra (for up to 1000 photos) for 600dpi? 90% or more of my photos are 4x6 or 3x5, with the rest 4x10 panoramic, and maybe a dozen each 5x7 and 8x10. Amateur photography, so the photos that turned out perfectly focused are accidents, but I did toss the more noticeably blurry ones. If the only benefit would be the larger photos, I can do something else with them.

My usage would primarily scrolling through them full screen on my 15" laptop, but I might get a digital photo frame. I know they are still pretty small but I assume the price will go down on bigger frames. Or I might play them on my TV, or put them in a slideshow for a family event. Very unlikely to make more prints from them.

$38 doubles the cost but it's still seems cheap. No sense in paying extra if I can hardly tell the difference, but if it's noticeable I'll pay the extra 4 cents/photo. There's no way to split the order and do some of each, btw.

 

[Walt34]

They are scanning at 300dpi. Should I pay $38 extra (for up to 1000 photos) for 600dpi? 90% or more of my photos are 4x6 or 3x5, with the rest 4x10 panoramic, and maybe a dozen each 5x7 and 8x10.

I've tried it both ways and didn't see any difference except a huge increase in file size. Upon further reading I found that the issue in not the dpi, it's the resolution of the original print. And even when printing digital photos I don't bother going to more than 240.

 

[RunningBum]

Thanks. As I think about it, the most likely use will be to browse through them on occasion to remember my son and nieces/nephews at different ages, and to remember trips and other events. 300dpi seems good enough and while storage isn't a big issue, why take up more than needed. Supposedly I can do 600dpi with my printer/scanner if there are a few that I want done better.

 

[Teacher Terry]

wow many of you took way more photos then I ever did. I have 6 albums total so not a burden. My kids can take what they want and throw away the rest when I go. Before my Mom died she told us to take what we wanted and then she threw the rest a way.

 

[braumeister]

The old rule of thumb I used to use was this:
200 dpi is a newspaper quality photograph.
300 dpi is magazine quality.

IMHO, greater than 300 for old photos just isn't worthwhile.

 

[Katsmeow]

The reason I didn't send them to a scanning service, is that I was concerned that these family photos would get lost or further damaged in transit. I felt they were safer here at home where they could not be lost, and being carefully scanned by yours truly.

I did use a scanning service, but I was [-]paranoid[/-] concerned about loss. So I sent half of the photos at a time. In most situations there was more than one photo of a scene, event, or person. So I went through and divided the photos so if the worse happened I still had another photo that was similar. I went those photos off and waited until they were done and then sent the others.

Sumday You said "So, this means whether I sent them to a service, or did it myself, I'd have to remove them from their sleeves, and then being an*l, I'd have to put them back in order." Actually the beauty of scanning is that you don't have to put the physical photos back in order. You can actually toss them and just organize your photos into digital albums.

 

[RunningBum]

Got my photos back from ScanMyPhotos a couple weeks ago, and getting around to starting to organize. 300 dpi came out great. What I did spend extra money on was the "Photo Soap" option, which cleaned up some washed out photos very nicely. Adding that option plus a mix of photo sizes added another $50 to the $19 from Groupon, still very worth it to me to not spend the time scanning 900+ photos.

They communicated very well, telling me when they got them (same day as USPS tracking showed), verified the order details, told me how long they expected it to take, when they started scanning, and when they sent them back. It is unsettling to have photos out of my possession, but they handled it very well, leaving me with a good feeling. The whole process took about a month.

 

[PandaBear]

Got my photos back from ScanMyPhotos a couple weeks ago, and getting around to starting to organize. 300 dpi came out great. What I did spend extra money on was the "Photo Soap" option, which cleaned up some washed out photos very nicely. Adding that option plus a mix of photo sizes added another $50 to the $19 from Groupon, still very worth it to me to not spend the time scanning 900+ photos.

They communicated very well, telling me when they got them (same day as USPS tracking showed), verified the order details, told me how long they expected it to take, when they started scanning, and when they sent them back. It is unsettling to have photos out of my possession, but they handled it very well, leaving me with a good feeling. The whole process took about a month.

Are the pictures scanned in a certain order, or just randomly? So if you rubber band groups of photos together, are they scanned together?

Thanks.

 

[RunningBum]

Are the pictures scanned in a certain order, or just randomly? So if you rubber band groups of photos together, are they scanned together?

Thanks.

You can pay $24 extra (groupon price) to ensure order is kept. I had mine in shoe boxes and over the years they got somewhat out of order from taking a handful out and putting them back in a different place, or pulling select ones out for some display and putting them back elsewhere, so I decided I'd just sort them after scanning. It looks to me they probably kept the order anyway as I see trip photos mostly still grouped, but I can't be sure. They suggest you rubberband photos together in groups of ~100, by size, to keep them from being damaged during shipment.

 

[Aerides]

My parents wanted a professional family portrait done a year or so ago, and found a nice photo studio.

They found they would also do scanning of old pics and slides, and my folks have had decades of hundreds of old pics converted. 700+ that were only on slides from the 70's, and several old albums.

For christmas, my Mom gave my sister both customized new printed albums of hand pics printed pic, and a thumb drive each full of everything. She included some old postcards by just phone-pic'ing them to add other stuff.

Point being, she found a good price locally, started with a small order to ensure she was pleased, then went the whole way in. No risk of shipping loss, easy to work out changes, and they keep everything now so she can get more if she wants.

 

[RunningBum]

I looked into a local place. It would've cost about $200 to do it that way, and they don't do the "Photo soap" option, so that would compare to about $40 at the service I used. It does remove the "lost in the mail" risk though, which certainly could be worth it for many.

 

[HFWR]

I’ve found that photographing the photographs is an adequate replacement for scanning. Certainly is faster, though perhaps not for hundreds of pics...

 

[RunningBum]

I’ve found that photographing the photographs is an adequate replacement for scanning. Certainly is faster, though perhaps not for hundreds of pics...

I started out with that, but simply taking a photograph caused a glare most of the time. I found an app that takes multiple photos from different positions, and it worked well except that I had to reshoot about 10-20%, and I was also getting a sore back leaning over the table to get them right.

I did miss a few while I was gathering mine to send off, and they also wouldn't copy a few that had a photographer's mark on them (copyright or similar type issue), but I'll just scan those.

 

[Scuba]

This is a daunting project. We have literally thousands of printed photos, and many thousands of digital photos and videos. However we find we almost never look at them.

Recently DH started organizing and culling the digital videos. He was spending hours and hours every day on it. He got burned out and set it aside for a while.

We will probably die with this ridiculously large photo & video library. We’re so busy making new memories that we never take the time to review past experiences.

Are we unusual? I’ve considered trashing the whole lot but DH won’t hear of it. And I have this fear that I might regret it and maybe when we’re older, we’ll make time to sort through it all.

 

[RunningBum]

I went through with a pretty heavy hand. If there wasn't a person (that I know) in the picture, I almost certainly tossed it, except for a very small number of nice view photos of vacations. I don't need 20 shots of a similar view, but one shot is a nice reminder of a trip. (I actually haven't tossed anything, but I did put them in a box separate from the keepers, and probably will toss them someday. I'm threatening to do a purge in the house soon.)


Unflattering and out of focus pictures also got tossed. I'd make an exception if it was a special event or someone I didn't otherwise have a picture of, but I don't think I ran into any of those cases.

That got the number down under 1000, which was the limit for the Groupon offer. That's more manageable, and I'm enjoying some of the memories.

A few years back I digitized about 6 VCR tapes of my son in the early years. There is one scene where he's about 6 months old, sitting with me and the in-laws cat, just yammering away and mauling it at times, and this pretty unsocial cat is just taking it. I've watched that a few times. Very little of the rest.

 

[LARS]

I recently mentioned to my wife as we were tackling our own paper photo nightmare how future generations will no longer be plagued with this problem as they age; their memories being 99.9% digital already.

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

This is timely as we have been trying to sort though the pictures that are in my Dad's possession. We thought it would be prudent to try and figure out who is who before he's no longer with us. However, the number of pictures (and the 37 different places they have been stashed) is overwhelming. From 1985-2005, he (and his deceased DW) had gone to WDW no less than 75 times, and each time, it appears that they took no less than 10,000 pictures. And videos...so...many...videos. Oye...it's quite the daunting task.