How to Digitize Your Old Photos

If you have a large collection of old photographs, it would be a wise decision to digitize them in order to protect them from damage or loss. The first thing you'll need in order to digitize your photos is to invest in a high quality scanner.

When buying a scanner, the higher the dpi (dots per inch), the more detailed your scanned pictures will be. Of course, you don't have to go over the top with the dpi; anything above 720 dpi will be adequate. Ideally, though, you should buy a scanner with at least 1200 dpi resolution.

You will then have to scan your photos individually. This can be a tedious and time consuming activity. If you have the budget, you might want to consider a photo scanning service that will scan and retouch your photos for a fee. You can find a number of these companies by searching on the internet, or in your local yellow pages.

Once your photos are scanned, you will require a software to alter, clean up, and retouch photographs. No matter how high quality your scanner is, your digital photographs will invariably be of a lower quality than the actual, physical photographs. For this reason, a quality image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop can be very useful in correcting the colors, contrast, and adding effects to make your photos come alive. If Adobe Photoshop is out of your budget, you might want to consider a software such as Paint Shop Pro, or if you are on Linux, you can use the free GIMP software. You can also use the popular Picasa image viewing software to mass-edit your photos.

A key point to keep in mind is to stay organized as you scan each picture. Make a folder on your desktop and name it something appropriate like 'Pictures'. You can then make sub-folders within this folders labeled by event and date (for example, photos from 2004 Thanksgiving would be titled 'Thanksgiving-04'). This will ensure that you not only know what occasion the pictures are from, but also the year and date of the occasion.

Once you're done scanning and retouching your pictures, make sure to make a backup copy of all your photos in a pen drive or CD drive.

Digitizing your old photos can be a tedious task, but well worth the efforts when you take into consideration the fact that you will now have easy access to your photos all the time, while protecting them from any damage or loss.

John has been writing online for several years. His late blog is about picture scanners, and how you should go about buying a picture scanner

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