Tips for "Scanning" Your Old Printed Photos with Tracie!
As a digital scrapbooker, I have tons of photos that need to be scrapped and most of those photos are in digital form on my computer/hard drives/cloud storage. I have those organized by date and I have spreadsheets so I can keep track of what still needs to be scrapped.
What I don’t have organized are my boxes and boxes of physical prints. With my oldest having been born in 2000, that means all of his baby photos are in boxes. I know I need to get them scrapped and into my albums, but I keep making excuses… I need to sort through them, I need them all organized first, they all need to be scanned in with my scanner. If I waited for all of that to happen, these photos would probably never make it into my albums.
So this is your reminder, as a digital scrapbooker… stop waiting and start scrapping! I knew as soon as I saw Traci’s Over The Moon collection that I had some physical photos that would be perfect for it. But (and here comes the “buts” again)... they were buried in a box, there might be more from this day that I need to find, I don’t have my scanner set up right now.
I decided that I would work with what I could find (I can always do another page later when/if I find more photos) and I would just take photos of my photos to work with instead of stressing out about my scanner. Could the digitizing of my photos be better? Oh, for sure. But does this page make me deliriously happy? Absolutely yes! I love seeing my 23 year old son's face in this tiny baby on a swing, I love remembering those days at the park by the lake. I am so glad I stopped making excuses and made the page.
Tips for “scanning” photos with your phone:
Choose a scanner app like “Picture Scan” by Photomyne or even the native Google or Dropbox photo scanning apps, you can even use the notes app in your iPhone, but using a specialized app will give you more options and crop/filter your photos better than just taking a photo.
Make sure your photos are well lit, on a plain background, with no glare for the best quality “scan.”
To get the highest quality “scan” with the most pixels, move your phone as close as possible to the photo while still getting the photo fully in the frame, WITHOUT using the zoom function on your phone. You want the photo to take up as much of the image as possible, zooming with the camera app will only degrade the quality, so physically place your phone close instead.
To prevent blur, place your phone on a tripod or other stable surface before taking the photo.
Once you’ve taken your photos, back up, back up, back up! Make sure to transfer your newly scanned photos to a computer, cloud service and/or external hard drive and make sure you name them with the date and pertinent subject matter for future you (and descendants) to know the who/what/when/where of the photo.
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