How do I scan old photographs and slides?

The technical part is straightforward. The reason most people abandon this is volume, so the method that works is the one you can sustain rather than the one with the highest resolution.

Step by step

1. Sort before you scan.Go through the box first and set aside the ones actually worth keeping. Scanning everything is the single biggest reason these projects stall.
2. Choose a resolution and stop thinking about it.600 dots per inch for prints is ample — enough to reprint at the original size and to crop moderately. Higher settings multiply the time and the file size for no visible benefit.
3. Clean the glass and the photographs.A microfibre cloth on the scanner glass and a soft brush on the prints. Dust removed now saves far more time than editing it out later.
4. Scan several at once and split them.Most scanning software can detect multiple photographs on the glass and save them as separate files, which roughly quadruples your rate.
5. Use a phone for speed if a scanner is a barrier.Photographing prints in even, indirect daylight, holding the phone parallel to the print, gives perfectly good results. Some photo apps have a dedicated mode that removes glare and crops automatically.
6. Treat negatives and slides differently.They are small and must be enlarged enormously, so they need a film scanner, a flatbed with a transparency unit, or a service. A phone photograph of a negative is not adequate.
7. Save as JPEG at high quality for volume.For a box of family prints, high-quality JPEG is the right trade-off. Reserve lossless formats for the handful that are genuinely irreplaceable.
8. Name and date as you go.Year first, then who or where. Doing it at the moment of scanning takes seconds; doing it later for four hundred files never happens.
9. Back up before you go any further.The scans now exist in one place. Copy them to a second drive and to cloud storage the same day.
10. Write down what the family knows.Names, places and years, while someone can still tell you. This is worth more than any amount of extra resolution.

Tips

• Do twenty minutes at a time rather than a whole weekend. Consistency finishes the box; enthusiasm does not.
• Scan the back of a photograph too if it has writing on it. That information is often the only record of who is in the picture.
• For a very large collection, a bulk scanning service is worth pricing. Check how they return the files and whether the originals come back.

Common mistakes

• Scanning everything at maximum resolution — It multiplies scanning time, storage and processing for detail that is not present in the original print. Most family snapshots simply do not contain more information.
• Keeping the only copy on the computer — The originals may be fragile or already lost. A single copy on one machine is the least safe place it could be.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask