I've wanted to preserve family photos for years - especially since my mother’s passing. While on maternity leave one of the projects I wanted to start this summer was digitizing all my family’s photos. I feel like it’s something I need to do for my children - so they are able to look back on our family history. Plus, with time paper copies of the photos will eventually degrade. Initially, I was looking into a physical scanner to capture all the photos - but the price wasn’t something I was comfortable spending. So after much research, aka downloading and deleting apps, I have found that using Google PhotoScan has been the easiest and FREE!
TIPS & TRICKS
What you will need:
- Photos you want to digitize - doesn't matter what size
- Smartphone
- Google ImageScan App
- Solid white paper
Place your photo on a solid white paper before you scan - this will help create clean edges. The app will have you take four photos, one of each corner of your image, and then will consolidate those four into one image. If the scan doesn’t quite look right - just delete and re-scan! The photos will automatically save to your phone’s photo library. After I'm done scanning I will Airdrop those photos to be backed up on a hard drive and then also saved to an online cloud server such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
Here are a few examples from the albums I've scanned so far...
Do you have family photos you want to digitize? What is your favorite method? Let me know in the comments.
- Leslie
