Photos offer an amazing way to keep your memories close to your heart and relive them whenever you wish. You might not realize this when you snap a photo, but you will come to know of their worth within a few years. This means there are all the more reasons you preserve those photos.
Back in the days when digital cameras or smartphones hadn’t made their debut, reel cameras were how people captured memories. The reels/negatives were then usually sent to photo printing shops who printed the pictures but never provided us with the digital copies.
Although it feels amazing to hold photographs in your hand, it is quite essential to keep a digital copy too. Physical photos can be easily damaged or misplaced. You don’t want that, do you? If you have some old photos that you now wish to convert into digital ones, read through the end of this article!
To get your physical photos digitized you will have to get them scanned. You can either do this yourself or outsource the job.
Buy A Good Quality Scanner
Most households have a scanner today. In fact, some printers have a built-in scanner too. Once you have installed your scanner, you can simply scan the photos turn by turn and save them into a location of your choice. If a scan isn’t clear enough or somehow got blurred, you can easily redo it.
As obvious, this method requires you to invest a good amount of time in it. However, it is all worth it! Your photos are priceless! Plus, if you already own a scanner, this method will be quite cheap (in fact almost free) for you.
You can also invest and buy a good quality scanner from sites like Amazon or eBay. This will be a beneficial investment for the future.
Use Your Smartphone
Over time, the quality of cameras that come installed in smartphones has improved significantly. The latest generation of smartphone cameras capture images that rival the quality of a DSLR’s result. Using your phone’s camera, you can easily capture images of all the physical photos you want to digitize and then save them. Even if your phone’s camera isn’t the best, this method will still provide you adequate quality digital photos.
The best part about using your smartphone is that after scanning the photos, you can instantly edit them and even share them via social media. From cropping to applying filters and from pasting stickers to adding text, everything is possible!
Apart from the built-in camera app, you can also use several apps such as CamScan, which allow you to conveniently scan, edit and share photos.
Hire a Photo Organizer/Scanner
Depending on where you live, you will find plenty of photo scanning and organizing services around you. If you are short on time or simply don’t feel like scanning a bunch of photos yourself, you can easily outsource the task.
It will be more costly than doing it yourself but again, the investment is worth it in the long run. A few years from now, you will thank yourself for getting all the printed photos digitized.
What’s Next?
Once you have converted all your print photos into digital ones, there is one issue that is guaranteed to arise. Duplicate photos.
It is very likely that you will somehow end up with loads of duplicate photos when the whole scan and transfer process is over. If you have already invested sufficient time into this already, you might not want to bother looking for duplicates to delete them. However, these duplicate photos can severely hog the performance of your computer.
If you want to avoid such mishaps, you should try using an automated tool like PictureEcho that can scan your computer in-depth, detect all the duplicate/similar photos and remove them for good. It is very easy to use and performs the job very fast with a perfect level of accuracy.
We hope you manage to digitize your photos timely and that your heart fills with exuberance every time you look at them!
