Monthly Archives: January 2017

How to Preserve Your Photos and Keep Them Safe

Posted on January 30, 2017 by

There are a few common mistakes people may unintentionally make when displaying or transporting photos. We share these common mistakes and several helpful ways to easily avoid damaging photos to ensure a long life time for those special photos.


Best DIY Tips to Your Preserve Photos That Are in Frames and On Display:


damaged-picture-frameEliminate direct sunlight on the photo. Just like everything else that is exposed to the sun will result in damages to your photograph. Direct sunlight deteriorates and rapidly fades pictures than if they are strategically placed where there will be minimal direct sunlight. If there is no possible way to avoid direct sunlight on the photo than it would be best to invest in a picture frame that has UV protection glass. Without UV protection, severe damage that will be done to the photograph can make photo restoration extremely difficult or even impossible.



Moisture, or water damage, is one of the most common ways a photo can be damaged. This type of damage can be caused by a variety of factors, such as liquid coming into direct contact with the photo, hanging a photo in a moist area (near a kitchen sink or in a bathroom), living in a high humidity climate, or even spraying glass cleaner directly on the glass of the frame (allowing moisture to seep underneath the glass). Once moisture gets trapped in the frame, the photo paper has no way to breathe or dry out it will eventually become damaged.

The best way to avoid most moisture related problems is to prevent your picture from touching the glass of the frame. You can do this by using spacers, or picture frame mats, so there is space created between the picture and the glass for air to flow.



Also, avoid spraying glass cleaner directly on the glass of the frame. Problems often occur when the cleaning solution runs down the side of the glass and comes in contact with the photograph. In time this can cause the photo to stick to the glass and if you try to remove the photo from the glass, it will peel off the emulsion of the photo paper and ruin the picture.



Never expose your pictures to drastic changes in temperature. Pictures are made out of paper and if exposed regularly to temperature fluctuations it will degrade the photo paper more rapidly. Be cautious when storing photographs in attics, garages, or any storage room that doesn’t have proper insulation.

 

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DIY Photo Scanning Apps vs Professional Picture Digitization

Posted on January 30, 2017 by

The Test: Photo Scanning Apps vs Professional Photo Scanning Services


Are Photo Scanning Apps Worth the Headache?


New photo scanning apps put the power of preservation into consumers’ hands, but at what cost? We decided to test out the new app and made a startling discovery.


The average family has 5,500 analog photo snapshots fading away from the ravages of time. Watch to see which is the most effective, simple and practical way to solve this problem.. What is the best way to digitize your entire lifetime of photo snapshots?


This YouTube shares a fun comparison between DIY scanning from your phone at sub-par, low resolution vs. professional high resolution photo digitization from the company which scanned more than 300 million photos. If you scan your pictures yourself on your ‘smart’ phone, 5,500 pictures will take 100+ hours of non-stop, non interrupted work.


[Video credit: Nichols Images – Video Production Services]


Watch this KRON4 TV news story for details: Tech Report: Turn old printed pictures to digital

KRON4 LINK


Just how fast is the ScanMyPhotos professional photo digitization service? This fast:

Read More

LOS ANGELES TIMES

USA TODAY

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

THE NEW YORK TIMES

AARP THE MAGAZINE

KTLA-5 TV NEWS 

MORE…


Founded in 1990, ScanMyPhotos.com, pioneered a smart and economical way to scan your family photos, which scored raves from many top media outlets.


Reviews On The Phone Scanning App


Six Colors by Jason Snell & Dan Moran: Google’s PhotoScan Uses Your Phone to Digitize Old Photos


WSJ: The Best Ways to Scan Your Old Photos 


PhoneArena: Google PhotoScan has a cool premise, but it’s no good for digitizing your old albums


The American Genius: Google’s new photo app means the past is the future is now (but it sucks so far)


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How to Supersize Life While Downsizing Your Stuff

Posted on January 27, 2017 by
supersize life

Debbie clam digging in Alaska (her current home state) in 2005.

It’s a common pipedream for many aspiring writers: to give up all material possessions and hit the road in search of adventure and quiet, inspirational places to write. For ScanMyPhoto’s customer Debbie LaFleiche this dream is about to become a reality.

 

“A few years ago, I wrote a book and after I self-published it, I thought ‘This is what I want to do.’ But I was always stuck on the logistics—how can I maintain my current lifestyle and support myself by writing? So, on my 50th birthday, I started a website and blog, Supersizelife.com, and it’s all about how I am going to completely and utterly change my life.”

 

Debbie’s plan is to supersize life by selling her home, drastically downsizing material possessions, buying an RV, and hitting the road. This new life will enable her to see the country, cut back on living expenses, and find lots of time and beautiful places to write.

 

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Digital Files After Death, What Happens to Your Digital Legacy?

Posted on January 25, 2017 by

digital files after deathIt’s a morbid subject, but one that begs to be considered in today’s Digital Age: do you have a plan for what happens to your digital files after death?

 

A will often dictates what happens to physical assets—furniture, money, property, precious family heirlooms, etc.—but what about our online lives?

 

These days we spend (at least) half of our lives online between work, social media, and using technology to store and access our precious photos and files. In the event of the inevitable, it helps to have a plan in place so your loved ones know precisely what to do with your estate—online and off.

 

What to do with digital files

 

For many ScanMyPhotos customers, their laptops, hard drives, and cloud storage systems contain thousands of print photos they’ve sent to us to scan. Oftentimes, these digital files can include generations of photos that date back to the turn of the 19th century. These simply cannot be lost in the recesses of the interwebs or on a dusty old laptop from 2010.


We are raving fans of the smartest cloud storage app service to easily preserve and share all your documents, including photos. For more details visit Upthere, the best cloud-based personal storage app.

 

 

 

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Water Damaged Photos? Don’t Panic!

Posted on January 20, 2017 by

One of the most common photo restoration requests received at ScanMyPhotos.com is how to fix one form or another of water damage. Whether it’s humidity or more severe contact with water, water damage brings us a lot of photo restoration business. We’d prefer to keep your family photos intact in the first place.


Whether your house was flooded or caught fire, your prized nostalgic family pwater damaged photoshotos have probably suffered from water damage.


The first rule of handling water-damaged photos? Don’t Panic!


You may be able to salvage many or all of your pictures. You might want to contact a photo conservation professional or consult a book on the subject, but here are a few of our favorite tips:


  • Don’t let the photos dry out! As your photographs dry, they will stick to each other and any other materials they may be in contact with. You’ll find it impossible to pull them apart without causing potentially irreparable damage.

 

 

Photo Restoration

  • Get to work as soon as possible. Your photographs shouldn’t stay wet for more than two or three days. Now is a good time to recommend having a friend (or photo restoration expert) scan the images before you try pulling anything apart or before doing anything that will further damage the photos.

  • While you’re working on your photos, store them in a container full of cold, clean tap water; the colder the better. Don’t add chlorine to the water, but change the water every day. The chlorine in tap water is enough to prevent the growth of fungi and other biological threats.

  • Rinse your photos in a resolutioncontainer of cold, clear running water. Don’t run the water directly onto the photos, because that could damage the chemical emulsion, causing permanent damage. Keep rinsing them until the run-off water is clear.

  • Carefully remove your photographs or negatives from the water, taking the smallest quantity possible. Pull them out of their wrappers and gently separate them. DO NOT FORCE THEM APART. Separate as many as possible before returning them to the cold water and starting on another batch. Repeat the separate-soak cycle as many times as necessary. However, sometimes you may not be able to separate materials without forcing the issue. In those cases you will probably have to just accept the corresponding damage.

  • Once your materials are separated, store them in water until you can wash them individually, using cold, clean running water. Use cotton balls, a soft cotton cloth or a soft foam rubber brush to remove foreign objects if needed. Rinse your photographs or negatives one more time after cleaning is complete.

  • Hang-dry prints and negatives from a clothesline. Make sure they will not be exposed to dust. As an option, special solutions are available that facilitate uniform, spot-free drying when applied to negatives and slides.

  • If your prints curl while drying, wet the paper side (NOT the emulsion!) with a moist sponge and place each one between two pieces of acid-free paper or photo blotters, and leave them under a flat, heavy object for a day or two.

Even if you follow these instructions, some of your prints will probably suffer permanent damage. In that case, still send it to us to find out which photos can be restored. You’ll be surprised!


You can also learn more about modern photo restoration in our next article, “When Disaster Strikes.”

 

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The Truth About High-Speed Professional Bulk Photo Scanning

Posted on January 14, 2017 by

ScanMyPhotos.com Corporate Headquarters in Irvine, CAWhen it comes to finding a scanning company online, your options could be endless. Once you find those companies, then comes the task of choosing the right one for you. How many have this amount of media profiles over 28-years?  Raving customer stories, reviews, and a Tales From The Pictures We Saved Podcast series?


“A weekend project to scan and safeguard hundreds of photos from the era of film was more than just an emotional journey, it showed how technology shapes our memories,” began this CNET review on ScanMyPhotos


“For affordable bulk scans, ScanMyPhotos.com is an old standby,” said The New York Times.


The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern said: If you’re not a do-it-yourselfer, you can always box up your memories and send them out to a photo-scanning service. This option can be efficient and even fairly inexpensive, but you have to be OK with handing over your most cherished memories to complete strangers for a few days.

 


 

I gave it a shot. I organized a group of 100 shots by year, labeled them with Post-its and sent them off via FedEx to ScanMyPhotos.com, based in Irvine, Calif. Within a few days, my prints had been uploaded and the originals were back safely in my possession. A nice woman named Shannon kept me updated on the process throughout the week.


  • Do you go with the lowest price? 
  • Do you go with the fastest return? 
  • Do you go with the company that ships your photos in container ships overseas to produce those low cost scans with non-U.S. labor, or 
  • Do you stick with a company that keeps the work in-house?
  • Do you try those DIY phone scanning apps?

In your research for professional scanning companies, you may have seen debates about the use of flatbed scanners versus high-speed professional scanners. We want to set the record straight about high-speed bulk photo scanning.


 

 



In the beginning, the differences were more pronounced between the two scanning options. Originally, high-speed photo scanning could only produce 300 dpi images at the highest setting and the scanners were optimized for scanning documents. By way of comparison, flatbed scanners could produce 1200+ dpi images, but the truth is, 1200+ dpi images is a huge waste of space unless your photo is either A) really, really small or B) you plan on printing that photo on a massive canvas. The photo scanning industry seems to have settled on 600 dpi as the ideal resolution for scanning photos.


F
Now, high-speed scanner manufacturers have “seen the light” with the potential for photo scanning with their equipment and have vastly improved scanning resolutions and the quality of scanning for items other than documents. Due to this epiphany, lead by ScanMyPhotos.com, which pioneered this entire industry–bulk scanners caught up to flatbed scanners and now all high-end, high-speed scanners can easily produce clear, crisp 600 dpi resolution scans. Think you could tell the difference between a flatbed scan and a high-speed scan? Take a look at the images below. Both were scanned at 600 dpi. One was scanned using our ~$80,000 high-speed scanners, and one was scanned on a $3,800 flatbed scanner (Epson(R) Expression 10000XL), both completely unaltered from the initial scan.


The KRON4 TV news story explains why digitizing your pictures is trending and a vital family project to undertake.


KRON4 LINK

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“The Challenges Of Preserving Your Digital Legacy”

Posted on January 10, 2017 by

Forbes contributor, Tony Bradley, published an in-depth article about how to access your “digital legacy” so future generations can keep your memories and archived pictures alive.

 


resolution

This is a trending topic, as TIM HERRERA, in The New York Times, shares more insights on the urgency to have a plan and preserve your entire digital profile after death. From Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google, what happens to your archives after you die? Read more.


 

Excerpt:

 

“There will always be software and tools for accessing and converting files which over time may become obsolete,” says Mitch Goldstone, president and CEO of ScanMyPhotos. “This is a big part of ScanMyPhotos.com‘s service, as a digital legacy provider. The worst thing is to not digitize pictures now as they will fade due to the ravages of time. Or get mistakenly discarded. We always urge people to have many backups in off site locations for all their pictures.”


A recent press release from ScanMyPhotos.com explains that the average household has about 5,500 analog snapshots. That means generations of photos are quickly fading away from the ravages of time. People post billions of new images from mobile devices every day, but the powerful social media storytelling platforms are mostly devoid of the history of treasured nostalgic memories.


Read the entire Forbes story here


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8 Trending Articles for Getting Organized in 2017

Posted on January 4, 2017 by

getting organized in 2017Welcome to 2017! This year is our oyster and the possibilities for fresh starts and new beginnings are seemingly endless. So, in the spirit of staring things off on the right foot, we thought it would be a good time to address a popular resolution: Getting organized in 2017.

 

If this happens to be your resolution, you’ll want to check out the following articles and take lots of notes.

 

  1. Apple’s New Hidden Gem: iOS 10 Automatically Organizes Photos

 

Why it’s a must read: For those who can’t even begin to fathom how long it will take to organize digital photos, this article shows how this new app will do most of the heavy lifting for you.

 

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