# Scan old photos to digital



## Emma (May 18, 2013)

Anyone recommend a service in the Toronto area who will scan, maybe involving some restoration of old family photos. It's time to get rid of all the old albums and keep some memories for the kids and grandkids. Otherwise they will probably get turfed when we are gone!


----------



## wendi1 (Oct 2, 2013)

In the interests of the preserving the spirit of the frugality thread, may I recommend scanning them in yourself? My Canon printer has a scanner and software that does all that cropping and red-eye reduction stuff, and you can send them out to your kids and grandkids via Picassa or something similar. Or on a USB stick.

That way, they can print out the ones they like themselves, at an additional cost saving!

I found this works best in small lots - scan a dozen after you check your email...


----------



## Emma (May 18, 2013)

Maybe I should have posted this in another forum. Not really wanting to be frugal, more interested in expediting this project as it has been at the bottom of my to do list for too long. Your scanner must be good, mine takes forever to scan one picture, and I just don't have the patience or expertise.


----------



## the-royal-mail (Dec 11, 2009)

My first choice would be to bite the bullet and do it yourself. I did this last year, choosing a scanner which scans slides, negatives and prints directly. I scanned 6200 images in all. Yes, it was tedious and time consuming but I saved a LOT of money and things were done the way I like.

Since you are not patient, I would recommend checking kijiji locally to see what scanning services you can find. Usually you can find someone who will do a basic scan for $1 per image. There are online options as well, but I am not comfortable with trusting my originals with what could end up being a fly by night. To me, it wasn't worth the risk. Best bet is to develop the patience and expertise to DIY (and a computer with a good monitor and lots of memory).


----------



## Beaver101 (Nov 14, 2011)

Emma said:


> Maybe I should have posted this in another forum. Not really wanting to be frugal, more interested in expediting this project as it has been at the bottom of my to do list for too long. Your scanner must be good, mine takes forever to scan one picture, and I just don't have the patience or expertise.


 ... how about checking Staples - they seem to have a full range of scanning, photocopying, etc. services (self-serve or not).


----------



## leoc2 (Dec 28, 2010)

Our family has used this service...

http://photoscanning.ca/


----------



## Emma (May 18, 2013)

Thanks for the replies. I definitely do not have 6200 photos! At least the last 10 years are already on my computer, and backup drive. Leoc2, that service looks like it may be suitable. I will look into it. I am getting ads for a scanning service when I log in here now!


----------



## the-royal-mail (Dec 11, 2009)

Be careful and google for problems:

http://www.bbb.org/kitchener/busine...vice/photoscanningca-in-north-york-on-1232948


----------



## leoc2 (Dec 28, 2010)

interesting find TRM. Thankfully it was smooth sailing for our pictures.


----------



## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

I found a service in Delta that converted 35 mm slides to JPEGs for 30 cents a slide. They also did 2"x2" slides for slightly more and they did colour balancing for all.

I use a Canon scanner for hard copies. One day I will get through them all!


----------



## realist (Apr 8, 2011)

Do you care how good the finished results are? Do you have prints or negatives? (Scanning the negative gets much better results if possible) I rented a negative scanner from Vistek in Toronto. After three full days I scanned maybe 100-200 pictures. It is long and tedious. Flatbed scanners are faster but not will not do as good a job but the results will be acceptable to many people. 

After that I gave up and I used ScanCafe.com to do hundreds of negatives about 2 years ago. It cost me a couple hundred dollars all totalled but the results are 100% better than I was doing myself and I got ALL of my negatives scanned fairly quickly and spent my energy doing stuff with the photos rather than the actual scanning part. I am fairly good with photography and Photoshop and they still did a much better job fixing colours and scratches etc. than I did. 

They send your photos to India, so if that's a problem for you it's not an option but after reading there site I was comfortable with it. I also had prints of most of my photos already so if I somehow lost the negatives it wasn't going to be the end of the world. I'm considering sending some of my parents negatives to them now. They used to send out discount codes via their email newsletter fairly regularly so if you are thinking of using them it may be worth signing up and waiting a bit to get a code. 

There are a bunch of places locally in Toronto that can do it but price wise Scan Cafe is hard to beat.


----------



## Emma (May 18, 2013)

I did find scan cafe on a google search but not sure I would want the photos sent to India. Digital Treasures in Toronto has some good reviews and I could drop off and pick up. Still researching, in the meantime am sorting and purging. Decided to keep only photos with people (whose names I can remember). Also organizing by decade, year, special occasion, etc. Deciding what to preserve is difficult.


----------



## Ponderling (Mar 1, 2013)

Call me old school. 

Scan them for today's convenience, but archive the originals somewhere out of the way that is not too damp or hot. The spare room back of the closet sort of place, not the attic of the garage, or the crawl space. 

I work for an engineering service company, and we have been with electronic media for over 35 years now with some clients projects. Now we find that we are rehabbing what we built from CAD records many years ago. Getting devices to read old media is a huge challenge. Often drawing it from scratch can be faster, and is more reliable.

Someone will chime in about cloud storage being media independent.
But are you willing to trust that something you store to a cloud location will be accessible by you heirs perhaps 40 years in the future?

The original slides might be a bit more faded by then, but still will be readable.
Colour negative and colour print are not great at long term storage, but something will exist.
Traditional black and white prints and negatives will likely do the best. That technology has shown it works out to 150 years so far.


----------



## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

I just checked and my total picture storage is now 30 GB. That is just the ones I have taken since photo studios offered the digital optional extra and some archival conversions. My guess is that the total would be over 100 GB. Backup is to both a 750 GB and a 250 GB WD USB drives.


----------



## briana26 (Sep 24, 2015)

I also want to do this


----------

