The best and quickest way to convert old family photos to a digital format and share them

I presume that most families will be like mine. They have hundreds, if not thousands of old photo prints stashed away in draws, boxes, albums and in those paper sleeves/folders you used to get your photo prints in. And all the while they get forgotten about they deteriorate to a point where those valued memories get binned by future generations.

My father has thousands of printed family photos and I finally bit the bullet and decided to solve the issue and make them digital and available to all family members.

So how do you do this – easily and quickly?

1. You could use your phone to take pictures of the pictures and process them one by one. If you have ever tried this you will know how arduous this process can be.
2. You could pay someone to do this for you. (But as you will see later this takes away the enjoyment of re-looking at and thinking about all those past memories.)
3. Or you could do it the way I have figured out. With this method, I can process about 100 photos in half an hour.

What you will need:

A good stack of old photos, ideally flat and not bent.
Your SmartPhone
An App – Pic Scanner  (it’s not free, about £3, but worth every penny. You do not need the Gold version)
A Google Account – and so you then have Google Photos.
A black background
A comfy chair
Time – about half an hour per 100 photos.

The phone app –  Pic Scanner is the key here and it was the best photo scanner app that I have found. You basically take a photo of the photo, its AI then works out the borders etc and auto crops the image (you can even scan multiple images at once and it auto creates separate images, but you will lose a bit on the resolution).

What I do is sit on the sofa (in a well-lit room, natural daylight is best and try to avoid reflections from any high gloss photos) and lay the black background on the floor. Then in turn scan each photo with the app – as you do this be sure to keep the photos in order.

When I have done about 100 photos I go through the images and check them for quality – that are they in focus, that they have not been accidentally distorted as the AI has done its work (I think bent photos and high gloss photos cause these odd effects). Any images that are not of good quality I can easily re-do from the ordered stack of original printed photos. (As I inspect each image I make sure it is orientated the right way as this saves time later when in Gooogle Photos).

OK, so now we have a hundred (or so) images we are happy with stored in the Pic Scanner App. As you look at each photo you will see the option to Export it. You could do this, but if you are doing large batches of photos this will take ages, and I want to avoid any unnecessary work.

So what I do is go to the app settings and there is an option to “Back Up” – take ALL 100 or so images and back them up to your Google Drive as a zipped folder. So now I have all the images backed up on my Google Drive I can safely delete all the Cropped and Original images on the Pic Scanner App. So the app is empty of images and ready for the next batch.

Now we can dispense with the phone and switch to the computer. Firstly we download the Zip file from your Google Drive, unZip the file with the 100 (or so) images into a folder.

Then provided you are logged into your Google Account if you do a search for Google Photos you can access your Google Photos.

You could just start uploading your photos. But a much better idea is to create separate albums in Google Photos and then you can upload the images based on a theme. (obviously, it is best to organise your photos around themes before you start scanning)

Once you have your photos in the album you can rearrange them and then share them online with family members and everyone can comment and add notes to the photos for future reference.

As I mentioned at the start. I have been processing printed photos at the rate of about 100 per half hour and this process forces you to look and review the images and it is quite a satisfying process. In addition, Google Photos is quite smart, with its AI it can automatically pick out elements of photos, and then you can search them. So, for instance, you can easily search your photos for “dog” or “clock” and amazingly it will show you your pictures with a dog or a clock in the picture. I have even seen Google recognise handwritten words on the photos.

And at the end of the day, those family photos and memories are preserved in a readily accessible media for the future.

If you have any tips or better ways to digitise, in bulk, printed photographs please ping me a message and let me know.