BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Preserve Your Irreplaceable Memories With ScanMyPhotos

Following
This article is more than 9 years old.

How many print photos do you have in your house right now? How many pictures capturing your childhood, special events, family holidays, and other memorable events fill photo albums or shoeboxes scattered about your home? How devastating would it be if you experience a fire or flood, and all of those irreplaceable print photographs are destroyed? You need to protect those memories.

Print photos have a unique appeal and charm that can’t be replaced by digital photographs. It is a different experience to flip through the pages of a photo album than to browse through a catalog of images on a computer. All of your photographs should be digitized, though—if only as a backup to the original print photographs. The digital images can be stored in the cloud, or stored on a USB thumb drive. You can maintain multiple copies at various locations to guarantee that your memories will be safe no matter what disaster strikes your home.

I tried to do it myself once. I used a flatbed scanner and started scanning my photos. I wanted to scan at a relatively high resolution, so each scan took a while to complete and finish rendering the image. After about 100 of those, I decided that process was too slow, and I started grouping them so I could scan four or five at a time. I got through scanning photographs faster, but it just meant adding more time on the backend to crop out each image and save them as individual photographs again. Eventually I gave up. I have more photos than free time, and it was just too tedious of a project to get through.

I reconciled myself to just not having the older photos scanned. Every photo I’ve taken since 1999 has been digital, so all of the moments and events from my children growing up are already digital, and I decided I’d just have to be OK letting those older memories go if something happened to them. Then I reviewed the ScanMyPhotos.com service.

ScanMyPhotos has been around for over two decades. What started out as a boutique photo processing company, evolved into a business that has streamlined the process of scanning print photos in bulk for customers.

ScanMyPhotos offers a range of services that include negative scanning, slide scanning, video transfer, and photo restoration, but the primary product is the Prepaid Photo Scanning Box. For $99, ScanMyPhotos will ship you a prepaid box you can fill with the photos you want scanned. The box holds approximately 1,800 photographs. The base service scans the photos at 300 DPI, but you can opt for 600 DPI scans for $189.

If you have photos stashed in shoeboxes, the process should be fairly simple. Most of my photos, however, were meticulously organized in photo albums. That meant I had to invest an evening going through every single photo album, and making decisions about which photos to scan, and which ones not to bother with. Some of the photo albums had sticky pages, so removing the photos to place in the ScanMyPhotos box was a bit of a pain.

There is a method for packing the photos that simplifies and expedites the process for ScanMyPhotos. You are supposed to group the photos by size in bundles of 100 or so using rubberbands. ScanMyPhotos will scan them all and burn them to a DVD, and return your original photos and the DVD to you within five to ten business days. There are some additional options available for a fee—like having the photos placed on a USB thumb drive in addition to the DVD, or requesting that the photos be scanned in a specific order, or a bound book of thumbnails providing an index of all of your scanned photos.

It took me a while to carve out the time necessary to sift through my photo albums and choose the prints to have scanned, but once I did the process was very simple and the results were awesome. I boxed up my images and shipped them off to ScanMyPhotos, and about a week later I received the DVD and USB thumb drive with my scanned images. Now, all of those print photos are on my PC, and backed up to an external hard drive, and stored in a folder that automatically syncs them to my Box account in the cloud.

Don’t just take my word for it. ScanMyPhotos has helped over 300,000 customers convert their print photographs to digital images. The volume of business has led ScanMyPhotos to develop a very close relationship with its local post office. ScanMyPhotos also credits some of its success—and the cost-effective service—to the USPS flat-rate boxes that allow them to provide the service while keeping shipping costs down.

One well-known customer is Katy Perry, or more precisely Katy’s father—Keith Hudson. Hudson used ScanMyPhotos to scan all of the family photos after meeting Mitch Goldstone, President and CEO of ScanMyPhotos, at a local Starbucks and learning about the service. I spoke with Hudson, and he had nothing but praise for both the process and the results of using the ScanMyPhotos service. Hudson highly recommends ScanMyPhotos, and told me that Katy declared it one of the best Christmas gifts she's ever received.

I saw a lot of old photos being shared this past weekend in honor of Memorial Day—friends sharing photos of parents or grandparents who lost their lives serving their country. It would be a shame to lose old photos like that in a flood, or other disaster. How many homes have been destroyed just this year from wildfires in California? How many irreplaceable memories have been lost?

The ScanMyPhotos service is fast, inexpensive, and relatively simple to use. Having tried to scan my own photos, and then having ScanMyPhotos do them all for me, I can say that it is money well-spent to use the ScanMyPhotos service.

Follow me on LinkedInCheck out my website