At Lucent Imaging, we’re passionate about photos and understand that your photographs are precious memories of the past. They’re a link to people and places that have been a part of your life, painting a vivid picture of your personal and family history. We want to help you digitise your old photos.
Over the last decade, accessibility to digitisation technology has made it much easier to capture, restore and share our old memories.
Here’s our 5 step guide to help you start to digitise your old photos today, ensuring that they’re kept safe for future generations.
1. Find your old photos
Let’s start right at the beginning, finding those boxes of photos, in cupboards, the attic, basement and garage. You can even make a start on digitising your albums.
When it comes to digitising albums, it’s always best to remove the photo from the album wherever possible. This way, you’ll get a much higher quality scan. You’ll need to take care here if the album is old or damaged (especially by liquids or humidity). In such a case, removing the photo may irreversibly damage the print.
Tip: If you still have film negatives or slides of your photos, we recommend that you scan the original slide or negative. It’s a little trickier but creates a much higher quality image for you to hold on to.
2. Organise your old photos
Think about how you want to organise your photos. By date, events or people could be a great start. Choose a system that works best for you and group your photos into your chosen organisational structure.
If you find duplicates of the same print, keep the higher/larger quality version and place the duplicate aside so you don’t double up on the scanning.
Many modern photo management applications allow you to digitally tag your photos with keywords and people. Keep this in mind when doing your bulk organisation. It might be easier to add the finer organisational details once the photos are digitised.
3. Digitise your old photos
Now that you have your photos organised, it’s time to start scanning them. At Lucent Imaging, we recommend that you purchase a quality photo scanner (Like the Epson V800) to achieve the highest quality results. Depending on how many photos you have, this can be a long process so be prepared for a solid stint in front of the computer.
Our digitisation guide has a lot of useful information to help you digitise your own photos. If however, you would rather have someone else do the hard work, we offer archival photo and document scanning services.
4. Restore your favourites
You’ve finished scanning your photos and you’ve probably noticed a few that have faded over the years. If you’ve got a good eye for detail, you can often correct this yourself using photo apps like Adobe Lightroom (Our Choice), Photos on Mac, Microsoft Photos or Google Photos. If you’ve found a few precious photos that are damaged, torn or creased, this often requires a lot more work, advanced knowledge and a tool like Adobe Photoshop to restore.
As a professional image restoration studio, we’re able to help with these more advanced photo restoration projects.
5. Store your digitised old photos
You’ve successfully managed to digitise your old photos, now it’s time to store them safely so that they don’t get lost. Some great options include cloud storage like Google Photos or DropBox. You can also store your photos on USB Flash Drives or External Hard Drives as well.
Using a combination of storage options and sharing the images with friends and family will help ensure that someone, somewhere will always have a copy of your digitised photos.
Check out our list of Cloud Storage Options to help keep your images safe.