In the age of Instagram and Facebook, most people want to share their old photographs with the world. When it comes to sharing old physical photographs, people often find it difficult to digitize their photos. In this article, we’ll give you a few tips regarding how you can digitize your photos effectively.
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Curate Your Collection
If you have hundreds of pictures mixed up, take some time and go through all of them before you start the digitizing process. Do you really need all of them? Have you checked for duplicates?
The first step would be to organize all your photos into different categories based on events or time periods. For example, make separate mini collections of your 1st birthday pictures and of your graduation pictures. Once all the pictures are sorted out, check for duplicates or highly similar photos and keep them aside. By scanning these too, you would have just wasted your time.
Next, go through each of your mini collections and see which ones you want to scan and which ones you want to skip. Once this is done, you will have a very clear picture of how many pictures you have to scan and approximately how much time it would take.
Invest in a Good Scanner
When it comes to scanning photos, having a quality photo scanner is more important than you would think. You wouldn’t want blurry digital copies, would you?
Some of the best photo scanners include Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner, Plustek Z300, Brother DS-620, Doxie Flip, and Epson FastFoto FF-680W. Some of these are even portable and PC-independent so you can use them whenever and where you need. These will give you high-resolution scans that you share on the internet easily.
Your phone’s camera could also act as a scanner but the results won’t be as good and the quality will decrease even more once you put the pictures on the web. Alternatively, you can also outsource this task to a photo scanning service provider but depending on how many photos you have, this might get costly.
Decide A Storage Method
Before you begin scanning, you must think about where you want to save all the scans such that they are preserved forever. If you want to share them immediately with your friends and family, saving them to a cloud service like Google Drive would be a good idea.
Alternatively, if you scan photos in bulk, you can also consider using a USB or an external hard drive.
Scan In Order
When you start scanning, make sure you scan all photos of one collection together. This way it would be easier to save and organize the scans with correct naming in the computer.
Check For Duplicates
Once you’re done with the scanning process, you should check if you accidentally generated any duplicates. You might think that it’s not that important but it really is. Duplicate photos not only waste a significant portion of your device’s storage space but also make your photo albums messier.
Instead of going through all photos manually, you can use an automated tool like PictureEcho to check for duplicates and delete them.
Retouching
Old photographs are often taken by not-so-professional cameras. It’s possible that your scans might be in need of a color collection or so. However, that’s not a problem in today’s age. With the help of intelligent software applications like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, you can easily retouch your photos. Other easy-to-use apps like Pixlr and NoCrop can also be used for basic editing, cropping, and for applying filters.
Additionally, you can also get in touch with a professional photographer/editor to get your photos retouched.
By following all these tips, you will ensure that you successfully scan, organize, as well as share your photos with your loved ones. The digitization process seems to be tiresome but the effort is worth it. Ten years from now, when you’ll look at your photos, you will be glad you digitized them.
