I don’t know about you, but the worst part about watching coverage of Hurricane Harvey, Irma and the California Wildfires, is the look on victim’s faces as they pick through the rubble of their homes, trying to find a keepsake. Even a photo of their wedding or of their children, can mean the difference between being with or without their cherished memories. What a horrible thing it would be to be left without the pictures you treasure the most, especially when keeping them safe and sound no matter what the disaster is so easy.
Have you been through the family photo album lately?
What shape are your pictures in? Are they sparkling and colorful or faded and lifeless. Have you taken the time to scan them so they’re backed up and secure or is the print you’re holding, the only one of its kind?
One thing that makes photos harder to archive than other keepsakes is the simple fact that we get so used to seeing our favorite photos hanging around the house, that we don’t always think to take them off the wall and scan them for safekeeping.
The good news is that with the advent of portable wand scanners, you can see your favorite family photos any time you want. The bad news is, you may have to peel them out of Aunt Sadie’s clutches to use it!
But, not to worry. We have some fabulous tips and tools that will give you access to all of your favorite pictures and get them easily and painlessly archived for all the members of your family, including dear Aunt Sadie.
As you know, there are two types of photos, digital and print. In this post we’ll be dealing with prints – basically anything that is a physical photo, whether it’s in a frame, in an album or lurking in the back of a kitchen or desk drawer. In order to archive those photos, you’ll need to scan them and get them into a digital format so that they can be put on a computer or portable hard drive.
In a few moments we’ll ask you to locate all of your physical photos. Don’t forget to look for all your albums, photos in drawers or files and those hanging in frames on the walls or sitting on your bookshelf. Then you’ll decide which of those photos you want to archive for safekeeping. After that, we’ll get them scanned.
If you have a lot of photos around the house, you’ll probably need some help dealing with all of your pictures. Why not declare one day “scanning day”. Invite a bunch of good friends over to help, and if you have as much fun as we think you will, next time have them bring over their own photos to scan. Do you have kids? That’s even better – they’ll have a great time helping.
Take Action!
1. Photos, Oh Photos… Where Are You?
First, locate and gather all of your physical photos.
Don’t forget to look for all your albums, photos in drawers or files and those hanging in frames on the walls or sitting on your bookshelf. Then you’ll decide which of those photos you want to archive for safekeeping.
2. Which Ones Do I Scan?
Although all of your photos are important, some mean more to you than others. Separate your photos into two different piles.
In Pile 1, place photos that you want to copy and save in a digital format, for safekeeping.
In Pile 2, place photos that you:
•Already have in digital format and could easily recopy if the one you’re holding was harmed or destroyed.
•Have numerous copies of in other locations. Check to make sure that this is actually true, before you decide not to scan them.
•Simply don’t care enough about to keep it disaster safe.
You can go ahead and put the photos in the second pile back where you found them.
3. Scan Away!
Scan all of the photos in Pile 1 saving them to your computer, as you scan. If you have a lot of photos, get the kids involved or throw a scanning party for your relatives, and let them help you scan, then give them a copy of the photos they want to take home with them.
If you already have digital photos on your computer, save these scanned photos to a new folder within your photos folder. For example, ScannedPrintPhotos, so you’ll know at a glance which photos are the ones you scanned.
4. Make Sure You Back Up ALL Your Photos To At Least 3 Locations
Once you have finished scanning, copy that folder containing all of your photos — the digital ones and the ones you just scanned and save it with a different name, like Photo Archive Backup, with today’s date. Place a copy of your backup folder in at least three different locations. Here are a few suggestions of safe places to store them:
•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, and take them with you during evacuation on a key ring or in your plastic evacuation bin.
•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box or water/fireproof safe in your own city.
•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box, water/fireproof safe, or with relatives in the city where you’ll be evacuating.
•In a password-protected online file repository like OneDrive, iCloud or Dropbox, or on the file directory of your personal web site. This way, you can retrieve them from any Internet-enabled computer.
•You can also save an extra copy of your photos on Flickr or another internet photo service. But this really shouldn’t be your long-term solution or only solution, since you have no control over these sites and could lose all of your data without any warning.
•If you really want to keep photos on a secure site that you can share with your family, try iMemories.com. Not only do they have great servers with outstanding redundant backup capability, but they can even put your photos on DVD for you, providing an extra layer of safety.
If you need more help scanning your photos — or if you have delicate or color challenged photos that need a bit more attention, here are a few tips.
How To Scan Your Photos
There are several great ways to scan your photos. Just to clarify, a scanner is different than a copy machine, because a scanner makes an exact digital copy of a photo. It’s a world of difference from a photo copy, which is usually pretty bad. In many cases a scan of a photo is better than the original. And the nice thing about them is that once you scan a photo, you can save it onto your computer, share it with family and friends or use photo software to correct faded color, repair damage or otherwise restore old photographs.
Most printers available now are three or four in one printers, that scan as well as print. You can also scan your photos with a dedicated flatbed scanner (all it does is scan).
Or you can scan your photos with a portable wand scanner, as we mentioned earlier. Portable wand scanners, like the VuPoint Magic Wand Scanner, have come a long way. They run on batteries or are rechargeable and save anything you scan onto an SD card. From there, you can download the scans/photos directly to your computer, via a USB cord, or you can pop the SD card out of the scanner and pop it into your computer to archive your scans.
The best part about having a portable wand scanner is that you can scan photos, documents, even things like marriage certificates or historical documents by swiping the scanner over it, instead of having to take all of those documents home and putting them, one at a time, through your scanner. It’s especially good, like we said, for scanning photos at relative’s homes. If they don’t want the photo leaving the house, just take the scanner over and scan the photos you want. Amazingly, if you’re dealing with a fragile photo, you can even scan it right in the frame. Or if you have delicate photos in a photo album – have you ever tried to peel photos out of an album without damaging them – you can simply open the book and sweep the scanner over the page. Then all you have to do is open the scanned page and crop the photos apart, saving each one as a separate photo. Photos archived, originals safeguarded!
One other method of scanning that we wanted to mention is the Kodak Personal Scanner. It’s a bit different than the others, because you can feed photos into it and it scans them as they pass through an inch thick scanning bed. The interesting part is that it comes with an attachment that feeds negatives and slides into the scanner and – are you ready for this – actually makes a digital copy of the photo, just as if you had taken it to the photo processor. We actually had some slides that someone had given us, and since we never used slides, we didn’t have the equipment to look at them. With the Kodak Scanner, all we did was feed the slide into the scanner and suddenly we had full color, beautiful photos from the sixties, that looked like they were processed yesterday. Absolutely amazing!
If you don’t have access to a scanner, then have a relative or friend scan them for you. Scanning is by far the cheapest and most effective way of safeguarding your important photos. If you can’t get them scanned, go to a copy shop like Fed Ex-Kinko’s and have copies made of all your photos, using non-acid paper. This will ensure that they will last longer and will fade less as they age.
Now that you know what you’re doing, scan all the loose prints that you want to preserve. The higher the dpi the better the quality, so use 300 or 600 on your oldest, most treasured photos. Then save the scans to your computer to back them up.
Once you have all of your photos or documents scanned and saved, look through and find any that are damaged, faded or yellowed and see if you can edit them to get them into better shape.
A lot of people run right for their favorite photo software programs — like Adobe Photoshop Elements. Adobe is definitely one of the best and we’ve used it on our own photos with great results. But the problem is, there are so many tools within it to fix your photos, that it can be a little difficult, not to mention daunting, to use. One day, Mom and I had had it, trying to get the results we wanted on some of our pictures that needed a lot of color correction. So we began to look for a way to get the correction we wanted in the same few steps (and I mean FEW), whether the pictures were simply faded or way out of whack.
I’m happy to say we found it. Or rather created it! We found five steps that work to color correct nearly any photo of any age, using Photoshop Elements and put them into our book Photo Finish. It’s downloadable for a limited time. Below is one of the photos that we edited using those five steps. That’s me at Disneyland when I was about four. If you have a lot of pictures from the fifties to the eighties that have turned strange shades, download a free copy of our book.
If you don’t have the time, energy or inclination to fix your photos yourself, we’ve found one scanner that stands out among all the others in the marketplace, for color correction. It’s the Epson Perfection line of scanners, with Epson’s Easy Photo Fix software. Do you have any of those photos from the seventies and eighties that ended up a muddled brown-orange mess? All you have to do is use the Auto Fix setting on the scanner and then scan your seventies photos. The scanner corrects the color while it scans. Truly amazing!
If you’d like a copy of the instructions in this post, click here to download the PDF Version to your computer.
Have Fun Getting Your Stuff Together! We’ll talk later…
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