Scanning old photos?

I scan photos using my Canon multifunction printer. Like AussieMeg I always scan at 600dpi. I agree with storing them somewhere online. I have several shared albums on Dropbox with my brother and his family in the UK and those work well.

If you have heaps of photos to scan something like the Epson Fast Foto might be good but I don't have any personal experience of it - and it does seem expensive!

I used my regular HP all in one to scan. I wish I would've known to scan at a higher resolution. But its done and I don't plan on re-scanning. It's a repetitive job.

My HP let me load up the scanning platform then I could use my mouse to put a box around each photo and scan one at a time. That saved some time. And make sure they are straight on the scanner. I have a bunch that were scanned crooked.

Make sure your scanner platform is clean and be careful of fingerprints when changing photos.

And most importantly make your file names descriptive so you can search easily, by person or event. Holidays are easy. But for people I just used first name and incremental numbers. So Kimberly 1, Kimberly 2, Kimberly-Don 1, Kimberly-Don 2, etc.

I hope this helps.

joblackford - thanks for the tag.

I bought a photo scanner for my project even though I have a scanner/printer. www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZJH63M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It scans at eiher 300 or 600dpi. I'll be honest - I scanned at 300 because it was faster and I have no intentions of printing enlargements. I scanned over 10,000 photos earlier this year (and 3000+ slides) and I still have 40+ photo albums and a bunch of random stuff still to scan.

Some of the photos were captioned - I kept those captions as part of the file name. I sorted by year when I could and decade when I couldn't pinpoint a year but could a decade. And I still have a big folder of scans that I need to research adn try and identify.

So my folders are Scans and then each decade (1890s-2010s) and within each decade I have a folder for each year and then the photos I haven't yet sorted into a year. Some of the photos were obviously from an event or trip and I made folders within the year for those (1992_Christmas for instance).

I tried to keep the photos in order the way they were originally sorted so if there was a photo envelope with 24 photos, all with captions....I named the 01 caption 02 caption and so on

I have them on an external drive, a secondary internal drive, and I uplaoded to Google Drive and shared the folders with my sister/BIL, my DH, and my kids so they can see them.


My eventual plan - time, energy, and money permitting - is to make photo books for the family photos and mum's travel photos (not ALL of them but a selection) - that way they will be in a more permanent format but easier to store than all the loose photos and albums and slides and ....

I also use 600 dpi for photos.

I recommend using an external hard drive in addition to the Cloud. Any and all technology can fail, and/or be hacked.  I copy mine to 3 different external hard drives, although I also want to upload them to the Cloud. Amazon Prime members get free, unlimited photo storage. There is a downside to the Cloud, though, because if your internet is down, you can’t access it. I like having my photos backed up on external hard drives for that reason. If computers change to something non-USB, there will still be time to copy them, anyway. Computers change rapidly, but not overnight.

Unfortunately, writeable CDs/DVDs are quite fugitive and officially considered obsolete technology. Best practice is to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule.

  

Personally I have two external hard drives that mirror each other and back up a third copy into Google Photos. I buy the Western Digital Easystore drives at Best Buy when there is a good sale - I won't pay more than $15-$17 per terabyte, and I find the 12TB drives go on sale about every 4-5 weeks for $180, which makes them $15 per TB.