Need to get valuable old family photos digitized... best company?

Richdog · 15 Aug 2017 at 10:23

Hi guys, as per title I need to get around 1000-1200 treasured family photos digitized in the best possible quality and resolution so that I forever have copies of them even if the originals are destroyed.

Do any of you please have any recommendations for the best UK companies that do this?

peterwalkley · 15 Aug 2017 at 12:18

Surely its more cost effective to buy your own scanner for that quantity. I'd also suggest a fireproof safe.

Azza · 15 Aug 2017 at 12:52

DIY?

https://www.google.com/photos/scan/

Delvis · 15 Aug 2017 at 12:54

http://www.scanmyphotos.com

Richdog · 15 Aug 2017 at 13:03

peterwalkley said:
Surely its more cost effective to buy your own scanner for that quantity. I'd also suggest a fireproof safe.

You think buying a scanner and spending multiple hours, days even, scanning photos individually makes more sense than simply paying a company a one-off £80-£100 to do it with their top-of-the-line equipment? :confused:

Results notwithstanding, hours of my valuable free time are worth far more than £100.

I only intend on using a company, so if we could keep the advice centered on this as requested that would be great. Cheers.

Delvis said:
http://www.scanmyphotos.com

You have personally used them, or just found with a Google?

jpaul · 15 Aug 2017 at 14:50

sorry - another comment on diy - presumably you do not have negatives as scanning these - I borrowed a Konica dimage 5400, with cartridge load is reasonably efficient/robust
~30s a picture. Labelling/meta-data adding takes time too, as long/longer, than the scan - working through a film a day was not too bad

This recent USA article (with their economy of scale) suggesta a minimum 50p for photos, so will need to be thinking >£500.

Mr.E. · 15 Aug 2017 at 14:52

£100 for 1,000+ photos ?

Good luck !

Django x2 · 15 Aug 2017 at 15:00

As long as you are aware that you can't "Digitise" something and expect interoperalisation to enhance an old photo, other than this just being a soft copy. It wouldn't matter if the "state of the art" company at 3000dpi did it for £80 and the other "state of the art company" at 1600dpi did it for £60, the end result will be absolutely the same. Unless you had the original negative of course.

peterwalkley · 15 Aug 2017 at 15:29

What state are the photos in ?

Where I was coming from in my original reply is that I had family ask something similar a while back, but it was only a dozen or so. The catch was that they were very brittle and needed careful handling. Very definitely not something you were going to put through an automated feeder or give to some minimum wage monkey to stuff up.

dowie · 15 Aug 2017 at 15:34

peterwalkley said:
Very definitely not something you were going to put through an automated feeder or give to some minimum wage monkey to stuff up.

Indeed, I'd be very careful re: any really old black and white photos. If it is more photos from the 80/90s etc.. and you've got the negatives then perhaps worth sending them off for someone else to do more efficiently. But for really old ones I'd take the time to do them myself - the time is money thing isn't really an issue, you're going to be looking at the photos anyway at some point - just do them a few at a time when you'd not otherwise be working.

Werewolf · 15 Aug 2017 at 15:52

I'm currently trying to scan in old photos and it's very time consuming, I'm using a Canon 8800f which is a pretty good scanner, it just takes time to place the photos on the glass, scan them, check the scan, then clean the glass at a regular interval.

One of the things that strikes me as I'm doing it is the sheer number of different sizes of the photos (not to mention those that have been cut down), which I suspect would make automated scanning of older ones a bit of a struggle to do cheaply (unless you pre-sort and know how many of each size there are).

jpaul · 15 Aug 2017 at 17:31

As long as you are aware that you can't "Digitise" something and expect interoperalisation to enhance an old photo, other than this just being a soft copy. It wouldn't matter if the "state of the art" company at 3000dpi did it for £80 and the other "state of the art company" at 1600dpi did it for £60, the end result will be absolutely the same

interoperalisation = intervention ???
that is what you pay for on some scanning services;
and a higher quality&dpi delivered scan would enable you to further enhance/fix it, if they do not

Puzzled · 15 Aug 2017 at 17:49

Also looking to do this, tried scanning a few in but the scanner just highlights all the imperfections and dust / finger marks on them that you don't really see on the original. Will give that google scan app a try

Amp34 · 15 Aug 2017 at 18:47

jpaul said:
interoperalisation = intervention ???
that is what you pay for on some scanning services;
and a higher quality&dpi delivered scan would enable you to further enhance/fix it, if they do not

It will largely depend on the actual photo itself. If it's on silver halide then maybe the higher dpi scan will make a difference, if it's a relatively modern colour photo then it'll be different.

Haggisman · 15 Aug 2017 at 19:17

jpaul said:
interoperalisation = intervention ???
that is what you pay for on some scanning services;
and a higher quality&dpi delivered scan would enable you to further enhance/fix it, if they do not

I assume he meant interpolation - e.g. using an algorithm to insert data which doesn't actually exist in the original

Django x2 · 15 Aug 2017 at 21:34

Yes, Chrome autocorrect stitched me up a treat

jpaul · 15 Aug 2017 at 23:30

(google)... it invents words ? was not in any dictionary I queried

MonkeyMan said:
Will give that google scan app a try

was not aware of 'this' sounds like an excuse for google to index/harvest all your photos - your life in their hands
lol

turn your old printed photos into digital ones with the power of computational photography
...PhotoScan has you move the phone around so it can see the photo from multiple angles. It's able to pick out "feature points"
as anchors as it assembles the frames into a full photo.

apologies for thread side-track.

GSXRMovistar · 16 Aug 2017 at 00:09

Very interested in this as also have a huge number of old family photos (from 80/90s) that I would like to get get scanned in. Not looking for the cheapest solution (already worked out rough cost of doing myself) but would like somewhere I can just hand over a stack of photos in all different sizes and get decent scans back from.

Richdog · 16 Aug 2017 at 05:36

Mr.E. said:
£100 for 1,000+ photos ?

Good luck !

I have already done quotes on various websites, I know that is roughly how much it costs for standard automated high resolution scanning. Give or take £20 depending on the place.

Django x2 said:
As long as you are aware that you can't "Digitise" something and expect interoperalisation to enhance an old photo, other than this just being a soft copy. It wouldn't matter if the "state of the art" company at 3000dpi did it for £80 and the other "state of the art company" at 1600dpi did it for £60, the end result will be absolutely the same. Unless you had the original negative of course.

Eh? I just want them scanned and digitized at the best resolution possible using a commercial scanner. Lets not complicate things unnecessarily.

peterwalkley said:
What state are the photos in ?

Where I was coming from in my original reply is that I had family ask something similar a while back, but it was only a dozen or so. The catch was that they were very brittle and needed careful handling. Very definitely not something you were going to put through an automated feeder or give to some minimum wage monkey to stuff up.

Photos are from 1970's to 2000's and are in decent nick and were always kept in boxes protected from the elements.

Werewolf said:
I'm currently trying to scan in old photos and it's very time consuming, I'm using a Canon 8800f which is a pretty good scanner, it just takes time to place the photos on the glass, scan them, check the scan, then clean the glass at a regular interval.

One of the things that strikes me as I'm doing it is the sheer number of different sizes of the photos (not to mention those that have been cut down), which I suspect would make automated scanning of older ones a bit of a struggle to do cheaply (unless you pre-sort and know how many of each size there are).

Exactly, it is a painstaking manual process and very time-consuming. I consider £100-£150 money well spent to save me this hassle.

MonkeyMan said:
Also looking to do this, tried scanning a few in but the scanner just highlights all the imperfections and dust / finger marks on them that you don't really see on the original. Will give that google scan app a try

This too.

jpaul · 16 Aug 2017 at 22:27

So let us into the secret which site is credible for less than £120 for 1500 photos ?

A quick glance showed asda coming in at £145 for 1000, and www.iphotoscanning.com at £100(+ media)
neither of these look very credible, hermes for postage, neither of these disclose what equipment they are using, I would expect them to be upfront like
a more rollys royce service like http://www.bayeux.co.uk/scanning.

lol : www.iphotoscanning.com / click2scan

Not telling you. So many people have tried to blag this information from us so they can do it themselves or set up their own business - good luck with that! We have the best service available by doing good old fashioned research and development. By buying different scanners and testing them out, we have settled on the best there is, and that's all we are prepared to say

They both seem to have minimum orders ~£25, so cannot give a few photos to them to see what the service is like.

utube vid showing difference of quality for negative scans