If you’re scratching your head about what to get for the spouse, the parent, the uncle, or anyone that grew up on film, don’t give it another thought. It’s a labor of love, but you can convert the old albums (or shoe boxes) of photos into neat DVDs and cloud stored images.
Why bother? Well, for one, it’s useful. Guaranteed you’ll pull up the digital images a lot more often than you grab for the old photo album. Plus, once your photos are in the cloud, they are easy to share and make the grandparents happy. Another point: Preservation. Those albums are getting old and dusty. Photos are fading, glue is becoming yellow and it will only get worse.
So, if you’re game for scanning your photo collection, there are a couple of possibilities. For a few years, we’ve been using an old Kodak scanner. You must manually feed in one photo at a time, so it’s tedious, but it works OK. But in about 6 years, I’ve only scanned a few hundred photos, which is depressing when you consider that a shoe box can easily hold a thousand or so.
Another option is to use a service. The scary part is handing off your family photo jewels to a stranger.
Costco will scan photos for 32 cents each. Sounds good, until you think about scanning, say, 1,000 photos, which will cost $320 at Costco.
Another online option is ScanMyPhotos.com. Their standard price to scan 1,000 4 x 6-inch photos is $49, but we found a Groupon that made it even less, provided you only send them 4 x 6-inch photos. (Who remembered there were so many size variations? It took me hours to sort.)
When we sent them the photos, we had some size variations that bucked the price back up to around $50. One problem—they scanned everything in landscape, so that all our portrait photos were sideways. And of course, some of our landscape photos were upside down. At around five cents a photo, they are not going to fix all these things by hand, but your photos may need work when you get the DVD back. That said, our experience with ScanMyPhotos.com was generally good – nice quality scans, our originals were returned in good shape, and we managed to take a 1,000-photo bite out of our mega-photo backlog at a reasonable price.
Going one step further, you can scan your own. The new Epson FastFoto FF-640 scanner is quick, easy and high quality. You can feed up to 30 photos at a time of mixed sizes (no slides though), and they speed through them at an impressive speed. A scan takes about 1.5 seconds and photos can include everything from 2 x 2-inch photo booth size up through 8.5 x 120-inch panoramas. Another nice feature is that it will read the back of the photo and pick up notes you may have added like the date and who was in the photo. The software that comes with the printer is easy to use, managing simple processes like naming batches of photos “Birthday 1980” instead of “Image 0001.” It will also do simple cropping and rotation. Of course, photo buffs would love extra features like image recognition to help sort and organize. Because you’re doing it yourself, it’s easier (not easy!) to stay organized as you progress.
We compared some results from FF-640 to what we got from ScanMyPhotos.com. Both results were great -- they picked up all the detail and colors were true. The Epson scans were a touch darker, which looked better on some photos. ScanMyPhotos had a bit more vibrant and saturated look, which looked slightly better on others. Both sets of scans were at 600 dpi, which should be enough for most photos. If you have an heirloom photo, consider getting it scanned at a service that uses a high-end flatbed scanner. The slight increase in quality and resolution should be worth it.
If you’re more of a do it yourself person, the Epson is the way to go. You can tackle the job over time, organizing as you go along. At $599 the Epson isn’t going to save you money unless you’re scanning many thousands of photos. Consider sharing the device within your family to save cost. If you’re more of a “let’s get this done today” person, sending off a shoe box full to ScanMyPhotos.com or some other online service is also a great choice.
Epson FF-640 on the left; ScanMyPhotos on the right.