I Have Hundreds of Old Photos, How Do I Save Them?

[Live2Eat]

Dunno if i should post this in the Digital/Video Camera forum but...
I have about 500 old photos of family members all the way from the 1900's up to around 1960. I got them when my grandmother and two great aunts passed away several years ago.

Most of the photos are becoming very brittle, and curling. What is the most economical way to save them? Do I take them to a camera store and spend the money to have them scanned digitally? I do not have a scanner myself.

These photos are priceless to me so I am hoping I can save them for generations to come.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

 

[vshah]

you can buy a scanner for under 100 bucks. scan a couple a day and be done with it

 

[Live2Eat]

you can buy a scanner for under 100 bucks. scan a couple a day and be done with it

Yea, I thought of that, but is a cheapie scanner going to be good enough, quality wise?

 

[vshah]

for the purposes of preserving memories, i'd say pretty much any scanner or all-in-one would do fine.


the main thing on a project like this is to start a routine and stick to it. I've been working on transferring a couple hundred family videos from 8mm into digital format. i'm capturing the raw video and dumping it to a safe location. in the future I can go back and remaster it onto dvds or whatever. i'm about halfway through after a year. your photos will obviously go much quicker


Just scan at the highest quality settings possible, and save as uncompressed images. You can then create another set of jpegs for emailing etc.

 

[purbeast0]

Yea, I thought of that, but is a cheapie scanner going to be good enough, quality wise?

when my dad died i used a cheap all-in-one and used the scanner that was part of that, and it scanned a bunch of photos just fine that i used in a slideshow i put together.

and this was like a $100 all in one printer/fax/scanner thing.\

i've even printed some of these out at CVS and they look fine.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Get a half-way decent scanner or all-in-one. If you're spending $30 on it, you could probably do better. If you're spending $70+ from a reputable brand, it should be good enough.

I have an HP Inkjet AIO that I picked up last year for around $100. The scanner works great, and even has a web-based program for scanning (no crapware installed on your computer) that will automatically scan to JPG or PDF. You can even select your own DPI setting.

 

[darkxshade]

Yea, I thought of that, but is a cheapie scanner going to be good enough, quality wise?

I recently got an all in one wireless printer(Canon) and it does a pretty good job. It was the MX350 which I got for ~$30 but had received a MX420 instead because they ran out of the 350 and was discontinued.

 

[Live2Eat]

Thanks all! Looks like I will get a scanner and get to it.

 

[vshah]

also don't forget to back them up to a couple dvds once they're all scanned in. lesson learned from experience - never trust memories to a hard drive.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

also don't forget to back them up to a couple dvds once they're all scanned in. lesson learned from experience - never trust memories to a hard drive.

copying into a picasa web album, free amazon cloud space, etc. is another layer of protection

 

[edro]

I scanned a few shoe boxes full of photos using an All-In-One.
I would lay 3-5 photos on the scanner and scan it into Photoshop.
Photoshop has a Crop and Rotate function that will automatically rotate so the photo is straight and crop out what isn't needed. It isn't perfect. Sometimes is crops too much or not enough and sometimes it rotates incorrectly. It still saves a TON of time.

It's amazing how small a shoebox full of photos looks when the files are listed in a directory.

 

[shiner]

Tell them to accept Jesus as their lord and savior.

 

[Nik]

Tell them to accept Jesus as their lord and savior.

:biggrin:

 

[Live2Eat]

Tell them to accept Jesus as their lord and savior.

I laughed. 8/10

 

[shiner]

I laughed. 8/10