The Case For Scanning Your Old Photos Yourself

My wife and I bought a $600 high-quality photo scanner and spent the time to cull, organize, and scan our 10,000 or so pre-digital hard copy photos. We are so glad we did! Now, they are a seamless part of our digital photo collection. Our pictures are always with us and we can easily search by date, topic, location, or face—memory dividends we cash in on frequently. 

But there are services available to do this! Couldn’t we have spent a few more dollars and had someone else scan our photos, saving countless hours of work while getting the same or better quality result? 

Unfortunately, no. Those services may look like a great idea at first glance, but the companies offering photo scanning services charge a lot of money to provide a lower overall quality product, AND you still do the lion’s share of the work. 

When my wife and I became minimalists and decided to scan our numerous boxes of photo albums and loose photos, we thought a photo scanning service would be the way to go. I researched numerous companies and concluded that if you want your old photos to be completely digitized, readily accessible, and in chronological order, you really need to do it yourself. Here are 5 reasons why you should keep your money in your pocket and take on this project yourself. 

1. You Spend A Lot of Your Time Either Way

This was a big eye-opener: only you can decide what photos to keep, and culling and organizing is what takes the most time in this project (we culled out about 30%). Saving time wasn’t in the cards. You, the owner of the photos, are the one who must remove the photos from the albums (or frames) and arrange them in size order in the company-provided boxes and insert note cards with year and event name (if allowed). Then after the scanned photos are returned, spend countless hours by hand fixing rotation and re-dating them to get some semblance of chronological order. Since this does not change the photo file’s metadata, this work likely disappears if you change photo organization solutions.

You still have to deal with any photos the company rejected (too thick, too small, too large, too misshapen, too much residue on photos, etc.). This would have been thousands of photos in our case, so I would have needed to get my own scanner to capture them anyway.

These companies are only scanning the easiest photos in the easiest possible way (for them). All the essential prep work of culling and organizing, post work of hand rotating and re-dating, as well as scanning the more challenging photos remains in your hands no matter what. That’s the heart of the job. What companies are offering to do—for a hefty fee—is the simple part. You have to invest the time no matter what. 

2. You Get to Include More of Your Photos

3. You Get Much Better Chronological Ordering

Companies don’t add past dates to the photos and generally require photos to be organized by size. So all 3x3s are together, 4x6s are together, 5x7s, 8x10s, etc. Yikes! This means that they will show up in your online photo collection in this jumbled non-chronological order unless you spend many hours re-dating them. I organized and scanned our photos dating them by month and year regardless of size. As a result, we had to do only very limited re-dating (e.g., putting the baby shower before the birth in the same month). Unless you hand re-date them, your old photos will show up in your collection with the date the company scanned them, not when they were taken. 

4. You Get a Better Product

In addition to having a more complete photo collection and better chronological ordering including better file metadata when you scan it yourself, you can add location or event name in the photo file name for improved search capability. You also have more control over scan quality. Some companies scan at 300 dpi (dots per inch) while many scan at 600 dpi. Doing it myself, I could choose based on the photos and adjust the file size. I scanned most of my photos at the higher quality 600 dpi, and some important photos at 1200 dpi. This quality and flexibility just isn’t available from a company.

5. You Save Money

I put this last because saving money wasn’t my highest priority. If companies provided a service worth paying for, I would have done it. But why pay a lot more money to a company only to get an inferior product and wind up putting in the same amount of time as if you scanned them yourself?

We spent $600 on a new, high-quality scanner. We could have sold it and recouped much of the value, but we decided to give it to a relative to scan her photos (and she will pass it onto others in our family). I researched estimates to scan our 7,000 photos—one company estimated $4,300, another company $4200, while a third was $1668. The least expensive I found was $1,340 for non-chronological scanning. By scanning our photos ourselves, we got a better product and saved a lot of money. Your savings, if you do it yourself, will vary based on the number of photos you need scanned. The only way we could get the great results we now enjoy—at any price—was to do it ourselves. 

Now that all of our old photos are scanned in by date, we have enjoyed and shared them far more in the last 2 years than we had over the last three decades combined. These are treasured memories of our lives. Doing the work ourselves was well worth it!