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[O78]Old Photos To Digital

by Jake Harpin, Jak

Paper Prints

Sizes 4X6 and 5X7. If they are kept too long, tend to lose their quality, the paper might turn yellow, bend and colors faded.

Slides

Are similar to negatives but projecting photos on large screen.

Negatives

Are processed film usually 35mm roll which hardly used unless to develop new paper prints.

Want to know how to convert all those old photos from traditional paper and negatives to digital? This is easy to copy and a better way to keep the photos in the computer for long time. For amateurs try simple, easy and cheap methods. Professional photographers will spend time and money on this process scanning and requires different equipment.

Scan paper photos prints on a scanner yourself, is a cheaper way, unless you want to send to a professional scanning service that will scan and mail them back the originals and a DVD with the digital scans. Sometimes, it's a risk to take, mailing the only hardcopy of your photos.

The Resolution is measured by the number of dots per inch, if you are going to scan it yourself. Usually the scanner can scan at 1200DPI or more. The higher the resolution the slower the scan and bigger photo file size. If the higher resolutions scan is at 300 to 600 DPI, you get better results.

When you buy a scanner check the scanning Speed, which is measured by number of scans per minute and check the speed at the DPI you're going to use. Speed is important if you are using more than hundreds photos. For better results, scan at the lowest resolution possible, 300-600DPI is good enough.

Photo feeding is not an issue if only small number, but for more photos make sure that the scanner is fast and easy loading. A good scanner will automatically load stacks of photos, feed and scan them for you.

Scanning negatives and slides is harder than scanning paper prints, so a professional scanning service is easier and cheaper. Standard flat scanner will not be good enough; you need a film/slides scanner. Negatives and slides are high resolution sources and require scanning at higher DPI than paper prints. In this cases 2400DPI or higher should be used. So scanning home photo paper prints is good enough but scanning the source negatives is a not needed.

You can see how easy to photo paper prints by yourself rather than using professional scanning service. For a small investment, get an expensive automatic scanner which has all the functions to convert your original quality memories into digital format, for you and your children to enjoy.

Plus you can keep these photos stored safely on DVD hard drive or online where you can never loose them. And you can share your photos with the world faster then you can say cheese!

It is observed that all the photographs imported from a photo scanner come with a very big size image file. The file is a TIFF file supporting very high quality image resolution and color depth. You may find that your photographs are imported with varying sizes as they might have on actual print. Now it is necessary to resize all those photographs to similar sizes for easy storage and maintenance. I generally prefer to use a free online picture resizer to resize my photo collection. These picture resizing tools make it very easy to resize multiple pictures at once.

An online picture resizer is a free web based service on a website, generally offered with some functionality limitations (picture size limit, file size limit etc.). These tools help you to resize pictures online from wherever you are. It is essentially used by people moving around the world or travelers. You don't need to have a photo editor on your computer or laptop to resize your pictures.

Before you resize the photographs, you can adjust the brightness, contrast and other properties for each imported old photograph so that they look consistent when viewed as an album or a slideshow. Don't make pictures too bright or adjust contrast too much otherwise you will lose original picture quality when you resize pictures with an online image resizer.

You should choose the right storage medium for all the imported photographs. I will prefer to store all the photographs on a DVD. This way it becomes portable and durable for longer time. Using portable hard disk is another good way for long term data storage. Hard disks generally require maintenance and protection so choose this option carefully.

Another best way of storing photographs for long term is to use an online storage service provided by websites such as xdrive.com and idrive.com. This service offers more than 2 GB online disk space to store your pictures collection. This kin d of service is useful for periodic backup and long term archival of important data and photographs. Again, please make sure that you have properly resized all of your old picture collection with an online picture resizer tool before uploading it online otherwise it would eat up lot of disk space.

Keeping your old photographs online with a storage services really helps you when you want to share all those good memories with your family members, friends and colleagues located all over the world. You don't need attach that bulky bunch of old photographs to your e-mail and send it to everybody. You can just send the links of those photographs in your e-mail and send it.

All in all, it is necessary to adjust picture properties of your old photographs and resize them with a free online image resizer which is also available on reshade.com before moving them to a permanent digital storage medium.

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About Author

Both Jake Harpin & Alex Don are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Jake Harpin has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Photo Printing and Computers and The Internet. Want to know the ? Read our. Jake Harpin's top article generates over 1300 views. to your Favourites.

Alex Don has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Home Management and Computers and The Internet. Alex D uses to write on image resizers for reshade.com . Reshade specializes in online image resizer applications and offers a freely available