Digital photos allow much more processing and much more flexibility than old film based photos. You could not do much with film based photos. You could print them on paper and put that paper print in a photo album or inside a photo frame. You could also print photos on special paper with special effects. For example you could print photos on slides allowing you to project those slides using a standard slide projector. Printing also allowed some other color and more sophisticated effects but it took expertise and a significant price tag to get those.

Digital photos are the new media used by digital cameras. Digital photos are computer files. In essence a digital photo is like any other computer file comprised of a long list of ones and zeros bits a few put together represent one pixel and the whole together representing the complete photo. Digital photos can be viewed on a computer screen or on the digital camera preview LCD screen. They can also be projected using a computer projector. They can also be viewed on other dedicated devices. They can also be uploaded to online photo albums and of course they can also be printed using a large number of home printers or by using one of the many professional online photo printing services.

Since digital photos are computer files they can be processed by computers. Computer photo processing offers unlimited options and for no cost at all or a very small cost. There are many photo processing software packages that are available free for consumers. They can instantly provide many special effects for example change the color temperature of the photo turn the photo into a black and white photo blur the photo sharpen the photo and much more. Photo processing can also provide help improving bad photos for example automatically identifying and removing red eye effect from digital photos.

Since digital photos can be viewed on computer screen they are not limited to a static media. In other words for example digital photos can be animated into a slide show. Effects like different fade ins and fade outs are very common when preparing a digital photo album slide show making the slide show more entertaining to watch. A great advantage of digital photos is that computer storage being almost free and unlimited means that processing and experimenting with digital photos is cheap or practically free and the only cost is your time experimenting.

There is however a solution for being able to do all of those wonderful things with your film based photos. The solution is known as scanning. There are many ways in which you can scan your old film based photos into electronic computer based digital photos. The different methods provide different quality and scanning speed and of course cost but regardless of the method you chose be it at home or using a professional service the result is digital photo files exactly similar to the ones generated by your digital camera that can also be processed at the exact same way.