Digitize Your Old Paper Photos to Preserve Your Family’s History

But the color and quality of your original picture won’t be preserved in a smartphone scan, and you may get glare from a flash. You might also need to crop or rotate the image when it’s done, which takes time.

Choose higher resolution, larger file size for posterity

You’ll want to scan your photos at a high resolution to capture a high level of detail for future use. The higher the dots per inch (dpi), the sharper the image.

For photos, 300 dpi is OK, but Smith recommends a minimum of 600 dots per inch. A resolution of 1,200 dpi is even better, especially if you want to enlarge a photo to a poster-sized print or for display on a large-screen TV at some point.

You can always decrease the resolution of a duplicate of your initial scan if you decide you want a 4-by-6 print. But you can’t turn a low-quality file into something high quality later.

The best format for your scanned photos is tag image file format (TIFF), Smith says. It will produce a larger file size than the more common Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG or JPEG) format.

JPGs are compressed files that you’ll find a lot on the internet because they help webpages load more quickly. But saving space with a JPG also means a decrease in image quality.

Pick both local storage and the cloud

Where to save your newly digitized photos? Your first option is an external hard drive, which has the potential for more capacity than the largest flash or thumb drives and is tougher to misplace. The second is the cloud, offsite storage on a company’s computers.

Hedge your bets.

Yes, a hard drive is a one-time purchase and doesn’t need an internet connection to access. And chances are good you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription to secure all the space you’ll need to store your memories in the cloud.

But if you’re not home to grab your hard drive in an evacuation or you get little to no warning, which can be the case in a flash flood, house fire or tornado, your external drive could be destroyed like your paper photos. Even storing a hard drive in a bank’s safe deposit box can make it vulnerable in a disaster.

A service you pay for potentially could go bankrupt, decide to shut down or face a data breach. But that’s less likely with longstanding national companies, and your files will be backed up regularly.

Look for deals in the cloud that bundle other services

Some cloud options available nationwide offer more than storage:

• Amazon Prime, $139 a year, includes unlimited “full resolution” photo storage and 5 gigabytes (GB) for video storage. Prime Video, Amazon Music for Prime and free shipping are among dozens of other benefits.
• Apple One, starting at $19.95 a month, includes 50GB storage that up to five family members can share along with Apple TV+, Apple Music and Apple Arcade games. iCloud+ 50GB storage is 99 cents a month. Get 5GB free.
• Dropbox Plus, starting at $119.88 a year, includes 2 terabytes (TB) storage, the ability to restore deleted files for 30 days and PDF annotating, editing and signing. Get 2GB free.
• Google One, starting at $16.99 for first year and $19.99 after, for 100 GB combined storage for Google Drive, Google Photos and Gmail and the ability to share the storage with up to five others. Get 15GB free.
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic subscription, starting at $72 a year per user, includes 1 terabyte (TB) of cloud storage — about 1,000 GB — and more than 10 apps including Excel spreadsheets, Outlook email, PowerPoint presentations, Teams communication and Word documents. A Microsoft 365 Family plan, $129.99 annually, is for one to six people and offers up to 1TB per user with fewer apps. Get 5GB free.

Go big on local storage options

You can start small with flash drives, extremely portable but tough to label, for as little as $12 for 128GB. These plug into a USB-A port on the side of a laptop while newer models offer the smaller USB-C port, also referred to as a Thunderbolt port on a Mac computer.

These thumb drives, so called because they’re about the size of an adult thumb, have as much as 2TB of storage. Think twice about making this your only means of digital storage because the drives are easy to lose, but filled with copies of your digital archives, they can be good stocking stuffers for your kids.

As for larger local storage, you’ve got options. Some examples:

• AData Technology Pro HD710, starting at $54.99 for 1TB. This durable hard drive offers water, dust, and drop protection that many hard drives don’t have and is available in sizes up to 5TB.
• Seagate One Touch HDD, starting at $79.99 for 1TB, is a slender drive that gets its power from your computer USB drive and doesn’t need to be plugged in. It, too, is available up to 5TB.
• Western Digital’s My Book, starting at $134.99 for 4TB, is a large desktop drive that needs to be plugged into an outlet. But this model has sizes up to 24TB, which could hold tens of thousands of high-resolution TIFF files.

Save time. Pay a service to scan

If you have too many photos, are too busy, or don’t have enough confidence in your ability to digitize the photos on your own, check out local or national services that can do the work for you. Online companies such as Fotobridge, Legacybox and ScanMyPhotos will give you an estimate and deliver boxes and packing materials with instructions so your analog media is preserved in transit.

Costco, CVS, Sam’s Club and Walmart offer their digitization services through Capture.com. Many Walgreens allow you to use their in-store photo kiosk to start your order and drop off your paper photos, negatives and slides in the photo department; iMemories does the processing.

Upgrade beyond the standard. Be aware that many services’ standard scan is a 300 dpi JPG, suitable for sharing digitally but not what Smith recommends for long-term preservation. You’ll need to search further or inquire about costs for 600 dpi TIFFs.

Most companies also digitize your old home movies, and some convert negatives and slides. Some also offer services to remove cracks and gaps in the emulsion and restore color as they’re copying your photographs.

Choose your media. After the digitization, the images become available to you on DVD, external hard drive, flash drive or online depending on the company and the output you designated. Sometimes a company’s online files are available for a limited time, so make sure that you load or transfer them before any deadline, such as 90 days.

Your original photographs will be returned in the same way you sent them.

This story, originally published April 22, 2019, has been revised throughout.