How to Preserve Physical Photos

Related question: what's the best way to digitize a collection of physical photos for personal use?

I ran into this problem recently for a family reunion where we wanted a slideshow of photos that were decades old. The best solution was to manually scan them using Google Photoscan which involves taking a 5 pictures of each photo with a phone and letting the app remove reflection, perform skew correction, crop, etc. This resulted in better photos than just using the phone's default camera software, but it still took 10+ seconds for each photo.

Does anyone have an recommendation for at home photoscanners that would allow me to drop a stack of photos into it and have it automatically scan them? I found various devices on Amazon that target this use case but they all have drawbacks like low resolution or excessive manual work. Has anyone done this with their family's old photos?

I also digitized over 200+ photos of the in-laws from the typical physical albums using Google Photoscan (I think about 10 years ago). I did it just for fun and to see what the workflow would be for digitizing the photos.

The ideal flow would be having a good-quality flatbed scanner and hiring someone to scan them. (I'm in India and the cost is comfortably affordable to set up such a process.)

Recently, when colorizing and animating photos was new and fun, I animated pictures for a few of their great-grandparents. It made quite a few grown-ups cry with joy.

I acquired every photo taken by my dad, mom, etc. about 8000 photos iirc. Almost all of the post 1975 ones had negatives, so I started out looking for negative scanners, as the negatives had probably been handled and scuffed less. I couldn't find anything with good reviews that was under $1000, so I settled with an Epson FastFoto FF-680W. After I did a couple of packs of prints, my wife took over. I think it took her about 6 hours over a weekend.

I then set up a "photo website" using a static photo site generator, and then uploaded the output to a racked server we have. Afaik no family members I sent the link to even looked. Oh well. I also sent the tiffs to Amazon glacier where it costs something like $20/yr to keep there.

Unless something has magically happened in the last six years, I'd still steer clear of negative scanners and flatbeds.

The Epson is soooo fast!

Talk to your local library. They know people who know people who digitize photos in bulk. Someone at the state university library would know.

Recently I scanned all 1,100 rolls of film that my father and I took, for a total of 31,600 frames. For the 35mm film I used a Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED, and for the medium format rolls I used an Epson Perfection 2480 photo scanner (flatbed). I had purchased these scanners about 20 years ago, but they are still going strong and produce great quality scans. They are slow and require manually feeding each strip of film; every frame takes about a minute to scan and process, especially if you enable filtering to enhance image quality. The Epson is also great at scanning prints, although I had negatives for most of what I scanned so I didn't need to scan many prints.

After scanning everything, my endgame was to look through all the images, copy the best into a separate folder, crop and edit them, and produce a book. I made a dozen copies of the book and mailed them to all my relatives. The original negs are stored safely away, and I have a hard drive (with multiple backups) available in the event somebody wants me to send them a scan.

Long story short, I would take the time to do it manually. Even with an automated scanner, the chances of things going wrong is fairly high, especially if your prints vary greatly in size and condition (bends, warps, etc.). Yes, it is a ton of work, but the end results are worth it. If 10+ seconds per photo is too much for you, just bite the bullet and send them out to a scanning service.

After a family member died I took on the task of digitizing several laundry baskets of photo prints.

I bought an Epson ES-580 automated document feed scanner, and still am pleased whenever I use it. The workflow for digitizing them was: USB stick directly in the scanner, put ~200 same-size photos at a time in the feeder, press "Go" and it'd scan about 3 seconds per photo (at 600 DPI, closer to 1 at 300 DPI). While scanning I'd set up the next stack, and periodically copy everything from the USB stick to a NAS.

Incidentally I used to work in a film darkroom and have a bit of experience with negative and slide scanners. Even in the best cases, they're tedious and finicky. If you want to digitize a perfectly clean 35 mm and scale it up to poster size then perhaps it's worth the effort. If you want to just preserve memories, even a bad photo of a damaged 4x6 print can still mean a lot.

All my sibling comments have lots of good info.

Clean anything before you scan, as best you can, while being careful. I used to do this professionally many years ago, but I don't remember the products. I had a bunch of different cleaning sprays, brushes and cloths. Different sprays melt different emulsions on photos and negatives, so always test in unimportant area before use.

I would also say to keep the unprocessed original scans, before any dust/scratch removal, color correction etc, since post-processing techniques are in a rapid state of flux lately.

I was lucky enough to use one of these $25K beasts:

https://www.filmscanner.info/en/HasselbladFlextightX5.html

The problem was the algorithms for removing dust and scratches in bulk. Look up what the latest tech is there. Always color correct old photos and negatives. They will have faded in some way. Use white point and black point tools to hint the software and you'll get 95% of the way there if you can find bright white and very dark spots in a photo. If you are properly serious, then make sure to use hardware to color calibrate your scanning tool and your editing monitor. Use something like an IT8 target:

https://www.silverfast.com/products-overview-products-compan...

And something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Datacolor-SpyderX-Pro-Calibration-Pho...

Save all your originals in some uncompressed TIFF/RAW/DNG format.

If you have a lot to do, you're gonna want to spend some money on a good scanner, at least $400+.

I had the pleasure of using a Epson FastFoto FF-680W. I was very impressed with the color correction. It brought back some color prints from the mid-70s that I've never seen without their color fade.

> colorizing and animating photos

Could you share the tool you used for this please? Thanks!

I honestly don't remember. However, there are too many now-a-days that I didn't care keeping records. Please do a search and try out a few, most of them just works. I remember that the colorize, at that time, had to be something that I ran locally. These days, there are lots of AI-powered Web Apps to both colorize and animated.

I got a super default Cannon scanner, which had a button that would scan everything on the plate, and if it detected an image it would save it as such, if more than one it would cut them up in to different images, as long as there was some space between them. They would be straightened and cropped

If it disagreed with you, too bad, but it was pretty good for 99% of cases. For some reason this was a windows only thing though.

When I scanned my last pictures I brought a portable one and handfed them. It is actually not too bad, so long as the pictures are relevant to you, because nostalgia sets in.

I recently scanned several hundred photos with a simple Canon PIXMA scanner.

Their app is horrendous but it allowed me to connect my phone to the scanner and when you became used to the process you could scan one photo every ~10 seconds. The only movement you did was changing the photo in the scanner and hitting the Scan button.

Until you photos have a different format. I tended to save those in one pile and do them in one go because the app was just so bad, specifically when all you wanted to do was change the format.

But this is an old method, you could do this 10 years ago in the exact same way I bet.

After the scanning I had to run a script that cropped out all the white around some of the photos. (ImageMagick convert using the -trim and -fuzz options)

My older family photos are too important to me — I scanned each one, individually, on a flatbed scanner.

Having said that though, occasionally if there was a sheet from a photo album where several photos were glued down, I canned the whole page of the photo album itself rather than risk damaging the photos by removing them.

FWIW, if a photo album is in my care, I first go through and photograph each whole page of the photo album, turning each page in order, so as to capture the layout of the photo album, order, and perhaps comments under each photo.

I do then carefully dissect the album so as to scan each individual photo (at 600 DPI as suggested in the article) and then to permanently store the photos in plastic sleeves. Photo sleeves then go into an album that has a storage box for it.

For dead relatives, I clean up the scans, fill out relevant metadata (date, description) and upload them to findagrave.com, ancestry.com, etc. The more places I can share the photos the better they'll both find other interested parties and likely outlive me. (My iCloud of course has a complete set of scans as do hard drives about.)

(Note: use Apple's Image Capture app that is included with MacOS, maybe an Epson scanner, Apple's Photos works well enough for me to retouch, adjust the finished scan ... older versions of Photos had a better retouch tool though so I keep an old High Sierra machine around just for photo retouching.)

As I posted here, upload your photos to Ancestry, FindAGrave, etc. Your yet-to-be-born relatives may well appreciate it.

Yeah, I hear you on the color restoration. I just ran the scans through Apple's Photos app and was able to restore the photo colors to something very close to what they may have been originally.

If you are careful about using the retouch tool to remove scratches and dust (that may have been present the negatives even) and if you are careful with adjusting levels, I am pretty sure I can say I have created modern versions of the images that are even better than the originals were.

And BTW, if you want to really up your game on some of the better photos, have a 8 x 10 printed by a lab using aye-sub printer to print to metal (aluminum). Assuming you have a high quality image, you will be blown away at how much dynamic range you can get from a metal print. Stunning. (Shhh ... I'll be making Christmas gifts this year from some of the family heirloom images.)

Apple's Image Capture seems to have a feature like that — where it autodetects the images — but I never use it.

I spent a ton of time on this for several thousand old photos and ultimately opted to use ScanCafe. It's not perfect, but if you have a little $, you're more likely to actually get the task done if you just ship them off.

+1 to the FF-680W.

It's janky. I had to try a few USB cables onces the original broke because a cat ate it, had to try specific USB ports, and the software is a bit rough. But the software allows you to scan both sides of photos, auto "enhance" while keeping originals, and do about 40 like-sized photos in an effortless batch.

It's also good for doc scanning!

I lend it to all my friends and family that have similar projects.

we didn't have any such issues, but i have a lot of the old style USB cables with the rounded square ends. They are used a lot in rugged devices and "equipment" or instrumentation, like ham radios, packet modems, ADC/DAC devices, scanners, printers. So i just collect them.

I have noticed in the past 4 years or so that i am throwing away "broken" USB cables at about 10x the rate of the years prior, so maybe the overall quality of cables has gone down? Even extension cables - those are "breaking" at a very high rate - and i mostly use those for wired controllers!

If you have a DSLR or mirrorless camera scanning the negatives with it and then batch processing them into positives is probably the fastest method.

Hey, I found the one I started with https://colourise.com