You must have bundles of old photos you want to share with your family or friends to have landed on this post. Either let them collect dust in a shelf or store them away in boxes. Both options mean you won’t get to look at them whenever you want to and that’s frustrating.
Well, you are not alone.
Not only do we want to share them online, but we want to keep these old photos safe from wear and discoloration. Good thing is, you can do this by using a photo scanner or even your mobile phone with a scanner app.
Scanning these old photos or creating digital copies is the best way to preserve and access photos anytime.
Using a Photo Scanner
Digitize your old photos in high quality using a photo scanner.
To do this, you need to set up your scanner station in a dust-free environment. You start by making sure your scanner and old photos are clean as well.
Using a micro-fiber cloth and an alcohol-based cleaning solution, wipe your scanner’s glass clean of any dirt. For old photos, you can use a soft dry cloth to make sure you get rid of the dust.
It is a good idea to sort the photos according to how you intend to organize them. You can so according to date or event or whatever you think would be nice. You can also sort the photos according to how you want to name the image files.
After grouping or stacking photos according to whatever categories you think of, you can finally begin scanning.
Depending on the brand and model of your scanner, there are different ways to power on, placing the photos on the glass table, scanning and saving files into your computer. To save time and also, make it easier to sort through scanned images, you can scan multiple photos at once.
Most average-size scanner beds can accommodate four photographs of 4×6 inches. Scan them together and crop them on your computer later on. There are also some scanner models that can do this automatically.
Make sure to set resolution at 300 dots at least per inch. For enlarged images, you can choose 600 dpi.
Once you are done scanning bundles of old photos, you can edit them or not. But we suggest you explore edit options such as cropping, adjusting color, brightness and the removing red-eye.
As for saving the image files, you can store them directly on your PC or laptop, upload them to cloud storage, save them on an external storage or upload and post them on Facebook. The site will auto-generate albums for you uploads or you can create your own albums to sort your photo uploads.
Using Android or iOS Devices to Scan Old Photos
There are plenty of mobile apps that allow photo scanning using your mobile device. Just explore the app markets and choose the highest rated apps.
Google has PhotoScan for both Android and iOS devices that you might want to try. Your mobile phone however, should have a high-quality camera to make sure the images captured are clear and crisp.
PhotoScan as well as other scanning apps allow editing as well. They usually have various techniques to remove glare, adjust colors and brightness among other features.
Just follow the instructions and start scanning. Usually you will need to ‘focus’ your camera before you press the capture button.
All captured images from your scanned photos will appear on your camera roll or in the app’s folder. In any case, you can view them through your gallery and share them on any social media site you prefer.
Although using your mobile device as scanner is quite nifty and convenient, you may find it hard to work on bundles of photos, since you can only scan one photo at a time. Also, the quality of mobile scanned images are lower than those using an actual photo scanner.
If both options don’t work for you…
If you have tons of photos you want to archive and you find both options discussed as tedious and complicated, you can always have someone else do the work for you.
Outsource the scanning work to a professional instead. You will be paying for the service, but you won’t have to deal with the headache of scanning the photos and editing them after.
You can be charged per photo, depending on the quality of the image or charged a bulk fee for 1500 – 2000 photos.
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