Digitize Your Old Photos

In this video, I’ll share the process that I used to digitize all of my old photos.

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*** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ***

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share the process that I used to digitize all of my old photos.

Occasionally, I have these morbid thoughts about what we might lose if our house burned down. I determined that as long as my family and dog got out safely, the only thing I would really mourn were our old pictures. I got my first digital camera in 2001, but I graduated from high school in 1989. So, that is 12 years worth of pictures that aren’t digitized and that don’t have back ups. Plus, there were some momentous things that happened in that period — like our wedding and honeymoon, for which I have like three albums of photographs. Would I be upset if something happened to all of those? Yes! So, I embarked on a project to digitize them and put them up in the cloud.
I considered using one of the services online where you can mail away your photos and get them back digitized on a thumb drive. There were two issues: 1) one of my albums was done scrapbook style with photos glued to the pages. I would have had to destroy the scrapbook and probably some of the photos to mail them away and 2) it’s expensive! One service offered 250 pictures for $250. One gave a quote of $.40 per picture, which sounded more reasonable, but I had over 1000 photos and shelling out that kind of cash did not sound so appealing to me. I figured there’s no rush, right? I can handle this project a little at a time once I had developed a process. You know — do an album a week — when I had time. (As an aside — that totally didn’t happen, once I started I spent every free waking moment doing this until I finished in just under a week).
Okay — there are three steps to this process: scan, modify, and upload. I’ll take you through each. First,
Scan
There are lots of ways to scan photos. You can now use your phone as a scanner if you use a scanning app like PhotoScan. The biggest issue with photos is the reflected light. Photoscan requires you to take 4 different photos at different angles to remove the reflection, which is time-consuming. In the end, I decided to invest in a reasonably priced flatbed scanner. Mine was $70 on Amazon and it stores easily (which was another consideration for me).
The scanner also comes with its own scanning software, which was a little glitchy, but worked well enough for my needs. Just double click on this icon and the scanning would start and automatically save the file into my pictures folder. I decided that scanning individual photos was too time-consuming, but putting too many photos on the scanner made cropping difficult, so I settled on three photos per scan when at all possible. The scanning software would attempt to automatically determine the edges of the scan, so the file would look like this, making it easy to crop. Obviously with the big scrapbook pages, I didn’t have a choice, but to scan the whole thing in multiple parts.
Modify
Okay — so here’s my scanned file. Obviously I have to modify it a bit to make it usable. I found using the Windows photo app worked well for rotating and cropping. It also helps that it is the default app that opens pictures on my PC. I double click on the file, it opens and I can rotate it and then crop photo 1, save a copy, crop photo 2, save a copy, and finally crop photo 3, and save the file. That way I have three distinct photos in three different files. OK, the photos look good, but I have to do one last thing — change the date.
My cloud photo service of choice is Google Photos. I love lots of things about Google Photos — you can see my many videos on the ways that I use it, but it does have some limitations. One is that your photos are always sorted by the date taken. You can’t sort by anything else: name, location, etc. It’s always chronological. The problem, as you have probably already guessed, is that the old photos that I just scanned have today’s date on them. So, they would be sorted in with pictures that I’m actually taking now. Having a hodge podge of new and old photos together might be okay for some people, but not for me. So, how do you change the date that is stored in the metadata of the photo? Luckily, you can change it using Windows file explorer. Choose a photo, right click on it, choose properties, then the details tab. Now you can change the date right here, which is what Google photos uses for sorting. Even better, you can change the date for multiple photos using this process also. Like the hundreds of photos from my wedding?