Old photos, new tools, and one practical reason to finally get those pictures into digital form
USA TODAY Best Tech has put something surprisingly old among its standout technology of 2026: paper photographs. Technology journalist Marc Saltzman included ScanMyPhotos in USA TODAY’s Best Tech Products of 2026, where the selections earned an Editor’s Pick designation.
USA TODAY just put something surprisingly old on its list of the best technology of 2026: paper photographs. Read about how old photos become new tech.
Technology journalist Marc Saltzman included ScanMyPhotos among USA TODAY’s Best Tech Products of 2026, with the selected products earning an Editor’s Pick award. His suggestion for anyone with boxes of aging prints was pretty simple. With 2027 around the corner, maybe it’s finally time to get them into digital form.
A bigger technology story sits behind that advice. For years, scanning an old photograph was mostly about preservation. You turned a print into a JPEG, saved it somewhere, and hoped you remembered which folder it was in.
That world has changed.
Today, getting an old photograph into digital form can be the beginning of what you do with it. Depending on the software and devices you use, that picture can be searched, backed up, shared in seconds, displayed on a TV or digital frame, added to a photo book, and viewed from a phone that didn’t exist when the photograph was taken. AI is pushing this even further. Modern photo software can increasingly understand what is actually in an image, helping people search collections by people, places, objects and activities. A picture taken decades ago can suddenly become much easier to find.
That creates an odd technology gap inside many homes. The newest photos on your phone may be searchable in seconds, while some of the oldest and most important pictures you own are effectively offline in a closet.
The photographs didn’t change. Everything around them did. That helps explain why photo scanning ended up alongside much newer technology in USA TODAY’s 2026 selections.
USA TODAY said its goal was to cut through the thousands of devices and products introduced each year and identify technology that genuinely improves how people work, live, play and stay connected. The team considered products for performance, design, ingenuity, and reliability.
When discussing ScanMyPhotos, Saltzman highlighted features like professional archivists, high-resolution scanning, and convenient options such as bulk scanning, quick turnaround times, GPS tracking, and support for a variety of analog formats like slides, negatives, 8mm and 16mm film, and VHS tapes. But remember, you don’t need thousands of photographs or a professional service to begin exploring the bigger picture.
If you have old pictures at home, start with 250. Skip the giant organizing project. Don’t worry about putting every photograph in chronological order first. Find the pictures you would really hate to lose and get those into digital form.
Then do something with them. Put a few on your phone. Send one to somebody who hasn’t seen it in years. Add some to a digital frame. Back them up. Try searching them with the photo software you already use. That last part is important. The goal shouldn’t be to move photographs from a box nobody opens into a digital folder nobody opens.
The point is to see them again.
CES 2027 (the world’s largest annual technology show) will arrive in January with another enormous wave of new cameras, screens, computers, AI products, robots and gadgets. Plenty of technology will be designed to help us create more pictures and more data. One of the more useful technology projects for 2027, though, may involve something you already own.
Open an old photo box.
Those pictures may have been waiting 30, 40, or 50 years for the rest of technology to catch up.
Read Marc Saltzman’s “The Best Tech Products of 2026, according to USA TODAY.”
[Edited on September 10, 2026]
