Saving Old Photos

When you look in old photo albums one thing you may notice is that if there is some really old photos they may be starting to deteriorate from age. One thing that is a good idea to try to save these pictures is to scan them and create digital copies that will remain and save those memories well after the prints are gone. All that is needed to do this is a scanner and time. For safety of the pictures a flatbed scanner is the best to do this. The type that you feed pages into have a risk of ripping the paper, especially the paper older pictures that are deteriorating are printed on, causing further damage to already potentially damaged pictures.

If a picture is damaged and it is important to you, you have a couple of options. If you are good with photoshop, you can do some restoration yourself, but if you are not that good at photoshop, there are services available that can do restoration services for you with. Prices ranging depending on the amount of service needed for the picture. If you need help finding this kind of service feel free to contact me and I will be happy to try to help.

In most photo software you should be able to scan the photos directly into it and be able to enter information about the photo into what is called "metadata". This is where information is recorded about a photo. It can be notes about the photos, cameras store information about settings, if there is GPS abilities with your camera, that will be stored there, serial number of the camera, and you can input copyright information in this section as well. This is an area that is not visible when just looking at the picture but is stored in the background of the picture.

Another option, this is what my sister that has been working on scanning my grandmothers photo albums, is to type the names at the base of the photos and this makes it easier for people that are looking at the pictures to see the information without having to go into photo programs to pull up the background information.

The pictures that I am adding on my blog today are some old pictures that have been scanned in by my sister. Most are from the early 1900's. Except for what is on the pictures no other information was recorded about them unfortunately.

So when you have a chance, pull out the old photo albums, and start scanning the photos. Don't forget to back everything up as well. Once you go through all this work you don't want to lose it all to a hard drive failure. Don't forget to go out and take new pictures, have fun and be safe.