How Can I Get My Old Photos Onto My Computer?

Ah, the old photo albums! Or maybe it's more like the the old box-of-photos-that-really-should-go-in-an-album-someday. A significant number of households still have a a lot of printed photos and/or slides stored away. With he digital age, though, there's more and more pressure to digitize the photos as well so they can be saved on the computer and even go on the Internet if you so desire. This can seem like a daunting task though, especially if you don't know where to start...

The best place to start is with a rough approximation of how many photos you have that you want to put on your computer. This matters because while 50 photos might be easy enough to do yourself in an afternoon, 5,000 is a whole other ball game. If you fall into the later category and have thousands of photos, hiring a service that specializes in digitizing photos and videos might be worth it, but if you fall into the former, it might not. For this article, let's assume you've chosen to do it yourself.

An example of a digital negatives scanner.

How are you going to get the photos into the computer? With a scanner. If you only have a small number of photos and/or don't care about getting optimal quality, using a scanner that's built into a printer can work just fine; check your owner's manual for instructions on using the scanner.  If you have a large number, or do want the best possible quality, a stand alone photo scanner might be better for you. These can range in size, price and features so dramatically that it's difficult to give much guidance here except to look for "photo digital converters" and do lots of research before buying anything. What about slides and negatives you ask? Doing that same search will also yield results for devices that can scan those too!

Practical Tip of the Day:
Still not sure if it'd be cheaper to do it yourself or hire a company? Price out the cost of hiring someone, and compare it to the cost of any equipment you may need to buy + how much your time is worth. Whichever is cheaper is our answer! (Keep in mind that professionals will often get it done faster and have higher quality results though.)