Plan Before You Scan: Review Photo Scanning Services and Features in Advance of Shipping Off your Ph

Spending a few minutes looking at reviews of photo scanning services for pictures and slides will show you that scanning procedures vary, as do the types of color correcting and amount of time involved. Thus, it is smart to compare the methods and services of a few firms prior to committing.

Why You Should Let a Photo Scanning Service Do the Grunt Work

First off, let me stipulate that you are far better off letting a photo scanning service do the grunt work rather than scanning a 1000 or more slides or prints by yourself. The appeal of shipping your stuff off to a scanning service is that it frees you from having to do all the monotonous work yourself. All you have to do is package up your photos, slides and negatives and ship them off to the scanning service. Nearly all of the bigger services take albums and carousels with a slight up-charge and return everything same way they received them.

But before you box everything up you should review scanning services and compare them to see what is included in the price in terms of scanning cost, image cleaning, what kind of color correction and touch ups they do and what formats of slides and negatives they will scan. You will definitely find some big differences.

Clean, Color-Correct and Smudge Removal

A quick review of photo scanning services will reveal that most companies will clean your photos, slides and negatives to remove dust, smudges and fingerprints. Yet I have found there are big variations in levels of image enhancements. Some companies will do scanning, cropping, rotation, color correction and red-eye removal using automated batch corrections. The top providers do the scanning manually and make color enhancements manually, one image at a time, with Photoshop. This will deliver far better images since it is not one-size-fits all correcting. Interestingly, there is not much cost difference, so this is another reason to look around before committing.

What Kind of Turn-around To Expect

The time involved can vary. A number of highly rated services have lengthy turnarounds of four weeks or so since they do all scanning outside the country with secure packaging and tracking. Quite a few scan here in the U.S. but it still takes a few weeks for quality scanning, and secure tracking is provided at all stages. While comparing turnaround times and shipping outside the U.S. vs domestic, I found that the major companies had excellent tracking procedures and claim they have never lost an order. However, a key point is, if you want high quality scans it will not happen overnight, especially if you have a thousand or more images.

Receiving Your New Digital Images

Just as before, a review of photo scanning services reveals that companies offering basic service will simply send a DVD loaded with your digitized photos, while full service companies give you a link to a web gallery where you may look at your images and organize them first. In addition to a DVD with the digitized images, some services provide a personal website where you can view, share and archive your images online. It's an added safeguard from unexpected mishaps, and it’s also very convenient for sharing. There are even a few companies that will let you delete a percentage of the images you don’t want, so you only have to pay for the ones you want to keep.

If done right, scanning your pictures and slides will maintain your old photos for many years and breathe new life into them so your children and grandchildren can enjoy them for years to come. But it’s important to take the time and assess the various scanning services before parting with your precious pics.

Valerie Goettsch is webmaster of Digital Photos 101, a resource for photo enthusiasts with reviews of the top digital photo services for photo books and prints, editing software and digital cameras. Before you part with your precious photos for scanning, read her photo scanning service reviews.