Digitizing Albums

Let’s say you have a lot of photos to digitize, but they’re not loose in a box - they’re in albums. What’s the best way to digitize these images? Well, it depends on what you’re trying to preserve. Just the photos? Or entire albums? Let’s look at each individually:

Just the Photos:

If your albums are ordinary ones bought at a store, there’s probably nothing particularly memorable about these types of albums except for the photos they contain. Furthermore, if the albums are the magnetic (self-adhesive) kind, you want to get your photos out of them anyway. I’m sorry to say that these magnetic albums, that have been so popular over the years, are not a safe home for your photos. The paper used in these albums is acid-based and is combined with an adhesive and type of plastic that destroys printed media. Get your photos out of these ASAP!!

If you have the time to remove the photos yourself, you will save a lot of money as digitizing loose photos is less expensive than scanning each page and then separating out the photos. A little tip: if the photos are hard to remove, try using unwaxed dental floss. Lastly, albums are often filled chronologically, so you may want to consider taking a picture of each page before you remove the pics.

The Whole Album:

Before

On the other hand, if you have albums or books that were meticulously (and lovingly) put together with notes on the pages themselves such as a family cookbook, or if the albums are scrapbooks, you probably want to preserve the entire album. In this case, each page of the album is scanned as individual image files, edited (cropped, color corrected and removal of dust & scratches), then each page is combined, in order, to a file that can be preserved. I also return to you the individual image files so you can organize them. You can see the entire process by watching “Restoring and Preserving Legacy Albums”.

As you can imagine, this process is much more labor intensive and therefore, more costly to do, but it’s SO worth it!

1. Scrapbooks, cookbooks and family memoirs are irreplaceable.

If your home suffers a fire or flood, these memories are lost forever.

2. Putting aside a disaster, time and the environment are the twin enemies of any memories that are in a printed format, and unfortunately, over the years many of these precious books have been stored in basements, garages or attics where moisture, heat and sunlight have steadily destroyed the pages themselves. But even if properly stored, paper becomes brittle and the writing fades.

After