Why You Should Digitize Your Old Photos

The one-copy problem

Most family photo collections exist as exactly one physical copy. That's fine until a flood, fire, move, or simple decades of fading happens — at which point there's no backup, no negative on file somewhere, nothing. Digitizing doesn't replace the original; it removes the risk that the original is the only thing standing between the memory and it being gone entirely.

What digitizing actually protects against

• Physical loss — fire, flood, theft, or a box that simply doesn't make it through a move.
• Gradual fading and color shift, which happens to every printed photo eventually regardless of how well it's stored.
• The single-copy problem when photos need to be shared among family members without splitting up or risking the originals.
• Simply not being able to find or enjoy photos that are sitting in a shoebox instead of somewhere actually viewable.

What a good scan should actually include

Resolution matters — a scan needs to be sharp enough to reprint at or beyond the original size, not just "good enough" for a small screen. The back of a photo is worth scanning too, since captions, dates and names written there are often as valuable as the image itself.

Organization matters just as much as image quality. A folder of a thousand identically-named files is barely more useful than the original shoebox — photos sorted by album or year, in clearly named folders, are what actually make a digitized collection usable.

What it costs

Photo scanning starts at $0.35 per photo, including a 600 DPI scan, hand counting, and organized folders. Slides and negatives start at $0.45 each. Every order includes delivery on a USB flash drive and a secure cloud download, with free local pickup in the Chicago area.