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

Skillmister · 16 Aug 2017 at 22:37

My dad spent months (years?) scanning in all of our family photos using the negatives. He seemed to just do it bit by bit while working from home or watching TV etc, had it down to an art.

bobbyspangles · 17 Aug 2017 at 01:16

Not sure I'd trust sending them off to some faceless company I found online to do. Do it yourself over a period of time or find someone local who can do it and then only in small batches.

OspreyO · 17 Aug 2017 at 01:22

That google apps is useless. Do it yourself bit by bit. I did some like this. The rest are still waiting a rainy day.

theone8181 · 17 Aug 2017 at 07:54

Surely doing it infront of the tv is the easiest way, it seems like one of those jobs that doesnt require your full attention.

Richdog · 17 Aug 2017 at 08:31

jpaul said:
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)
s

I said 1000-1200 photos, where are you getting 1500 from? Obviously 1500 will be more expensive, it's 300-500 more than I quoted for? :confused:

https://www.bestphotoscan.co.uk/photo-scanning-prices/ = less than £100 for 1200 scans. 600dpi https://www.bestphotoscan.co.uk/knowledge-base/resolution-scan-photos/

https://www.myphotoscanning.co.uk/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhfGF3N_d1QIVyuMbCh1hcAltEAAYAiAAEgK-A_D_BwE = = £120 for 1200 photos scanned at 1200dpi. This is my top online option so far.

bobbyspangles said:
Not sure I'd trust sending them off to some faceless company I found online to do. Do it yourself over a period of time or find someone local who can do it and then only in small batches.

I did also look at local options and my dad is checking some out so he can take the potos physically. So far we found this one that scans at 1200dpi and also provides TIFF files which is cool. Also for £110 for 1200 scans http://www.pixave.co.uk/photo-scanning-service

Also this place is pretty local but need to get quotes http://www.supaphoto.com/Photo_Scanning.html

OspreyO said:
That google apps is useless. Do it yourself bit by bit. I did some like this. The rest are still waiting a rainy day.

theone8181 said:
Surely doing it infront of the tv is the easiest way, it seems like one of those jobs that doesnt require your full attention.

Come on guys I'm sure you're intelligent people, I don't need to explain things multiple times do I?

jpaul · 17 Aug 2017 at 12:06

Richdog said:
300-500 more than I quoted for?

thats inflation for you.

tiff would be good (jpg quality is arbitrary ?) - but would need to burn to blu-ray (how do they deliver)

Did not see the myphotoscanning 1200dpi option, but the equipment they list
Kodak Picture Saving System/ps80 (84pictures/min)does only1200dpi interpolated
their trial looks good .. and can then see how it looks on a big screen monitor or tv
"Does this interpolation give more resolution? No, of course not. There is no added detail present from the original photograph. It's just a larger image, which simply repeats existing data, and at best it's a mix of real and faked data."

also pixave site tries to justify only having 300dpi scan on modern photos printed at 300dpi that is fallacious, but maybe they have an excellent quality unspecified scanner

Richdog · 17 Aug 2017 at 12:52

jpaul said:
thats inflation for you.

tiff would be good (jpg quality is arbitrary ?) - but would need to burn to blu-ray (how do they deliver)

Eh? You wouldn't need to burn 1200 TIFF files to blu-ray. Average file size of a 6x4 photo would be 5MB or so.

jpaul · 20 Aug 2017 at 07:26

due diligence - concluded that to get the turnaround these companies provide they must all be using
kodak picture saving system £2-3K that gives 85 pictures a minute and these only offer an interpolated 1200dpi.
there is nothing else in the commercial domain these companies could be using for the prices they demand

with older photo if you want to put them up on 28" desktop monitor let alone a bigger tv the 64K$ question is whether a higher scan than 600 could be beneficial.

also not convinced about the kodak options

Selectable Image Cleaner Tool to optimize captured image quality by reducing the effects that environmental factors, like dust, may cause; red-eye removal; KODAK PERFECT TOUCH Technology customized for photo scanning (photo retouching, contrast adjustment and color correction - applies to running on Windows based PC's only); auto deskew; auto cropping; image rotation (manual and automatic); image sharpening (during scanning with the PS80, post-scan with the PS50 - applies to running on Windows based PC's only)

they maybe engaging
- would not want my pictures un-necessarily mutilated.

wesley · 20 Aug 2017 at 08:30

Could buy a second hand Fujitsu feed in scanner. Can't remember what model. Scan 30x A4 really quick. Less than 1 min.

We got them at work.i like them

GSXRMovistar · 20 Aug 2017 at 09:40

jpaul said:
due diligence - concluded that to get the turnaround these companies provide they must all be using
kodak picture saving system £2-3K that gives 85 pictures a minute and these only offer an interpolated 1200dpi.
there is nothing else in the commercial domain these companies could be using for the prices they demand

Surprised by how cheap they are, for commercial use I would have expected something much larger/costly.

rIcK · 21 Aug 2017 at 04:19

I got around 500 pictures scanned along with around 100 negatives since I didn't want them lying about anymore.

Used these guys, excellent results. Did in around 2014? I requested a DPI which was higher than the usual.

http://www.pixave.co.uk/

Seem to get lots of good reviews, I dealt with a lady named Leslie there.

GSXRMovistar · 10 Sep 2017 at 09:31

OP how did you get on, did you get them scanned?

Puzzled · 10 Sep 2017 at 09:52

How do you plan to organise them after?

I've started scanning mine in (taking ages as a few have dust / marks on them from storage) but I can't decide on the best way to store them with info on who's in them, data, location etc. You can get family album software but you risk it becoming obsolete. Ideally want one that saves the relevant info to the jepg meta data but also presents them in a nice way /easy to use way.

Richdog · 10 Sep 2017 at 10:52

MonkeyMan said:
How do you plan to organise them after?

I've started scanning mine in (taking ages as a few have dust / marks on them from storage) but I can't decide on the best way to store them with info on who's in them, data, location etc. You can get family album software but you risk it becoming obsolete. Ideally want one that saves the relevant info to the jepg meta data but also presents them in a nice way /easy to use way.

Not sure yet, I'll cross that bridge when I get there! Please let me know if you find a good system though.

Pho · 10 Sep 2017 at 11:20

MonkeyMan said:
How do you plan to organise them after?

I've started scanning mine in (taking ages as a few have dust / marks on them from storage) but I can't decide on the best way to store them with info on who's in them, data, location etc. You can get family album software but you risk it becoming obsolete. Ideally want one that saves the relevant info to the jepg meta data but also presents them in a nice way /easy to use way.

Richdog said:
Not sure yet, I'll cross that bridge when I get there! Please let me know if you find a good system though.

If you want to edit, store, and tag them, Adobe Lightroom is pretty much the best you can get. I think they do a cloud storage version now too. You can tag each photo with various keywords to search by (you can bulk apply tags too which saves time). Given pretty much every pro photographer seems to use it, it's not going obsolete anytime soon

One of the main benefits of Lightroom though is that any edits you make are non-destructive. That is, your original image remains completely untouched - so if you use it to crop the photo, edit the brightness, tweak the colours, edit out some dust etc Lightroom just stores all the steps you took to take your original photo and get it into that state. You can export the image as a new file with all these steps applied, but you can also roll back to the original image if you wanted to and start again.