Many households have old photos stored in multiple locations. The baby photos are in a plastic bin, while the vacation photos are all around the basement. Regardless, all these photos are vulnerable to the march of time. Dust collects, water damage happens, and any number of other factors could take those memories from a family. Instead of leaving this up to chance, more families should consider taking steps to digitize photos at home.
Buy the Right Equipment
In order to digitize photos at home, the project needs a scanner. There are many different models of scanner available in the modern marketplace. While a regular computer scanner may be able to do the job, a specially designed picture scanner does the job faster. The quality may also be better with the latter method.
Set Up the Software
Every new scanner comes with software. How helpful this software is for the task varies scanner to scanner. This software is usually designed to make the job easier, not harder. Regardless, it’s essential to install it. Otherwise, the scanner will not connect with the computer being used for digitizing photos at home.
Organize the Photos
In most households, old pictures are in a jumble in storage. Birthday parties combined with vacation combined with the kids’ polaroid experiments doesn’t speed up the process. To effectively digitize photos at home, organize the photos before scanning begins. Group them by age and activity to make the process easier later.
Scan Each Picture
Scanning photos at home can be a time-consuming process, depending on the number of photos. Generally, blocking out a couple hours at a time makes the project less overwhelming. While scanning photos, music or TV shows make the time pass faster. Some people even gather their friends and family for a photo party to digitize pictures at home. Sharing memories is an excellent bonding activity.
Organize the Scans
Upon completion of photo digitization, there is still the task of organizing them. If photo organizing happened before scanning, it’s easy to group the photos and move them to a well-labeled folder. However, many people choose to take an even more in-depth approach when they digitize photos at home.
For the sake of future organization, labeling each photo is necessary. The scanner will assign an alphanumeric sequence while the work is going on, but that says nothing about the picture. Instead, consider relabeling photos. This process takes a lot more in-depth approach.
For the sake of ease, set up how all the labels will work for all the photos. Some suggestions include names of the people in the picture and where the image came from to the title. Other people prefer to combine the date with one of the two elements mentioned above. Regardless, once this process is complete and the photos are in folders, the project is done.
