Scan Photo Albums & Scrapbooks
Photo albums are a wonderful way to store memories. It could be a carefully catalogued lifetime of moments, from first steps to university graduation. Or maybe that one special day that deserved a dedicated album of its own – what married couple doesn’t own a wedding album in one form or another to commemorate that lifechanging day? Maybe you even got creative and turned your photobooks into works of art with decorative scrapbooking projects.
But after a lifetime of treasured moments, those shelves of photo albums can start to become a burden on your space, and if they are relegated to a mouldy corner of the attic, they are in danger of getting damaged. You can insure your albums and scrapbooks are preserved for future generations to enjoy by converting them into a secure and compact digital album in the format that suits you best, whether that’s on a memory stick, a DVD, or in a cloud-based album you can view online anywhere. You can find out more about your format options here.
Start preserving your memories now.
What are my options?
Different types of digitisation
EachMoment can take your photo albums and give them a new life in whatever form you choose, preserving that story exactly as you want to it to be told.
One digital image file will be created for each image in the album. We take delivery of the entire album, take scans of the photos and then crop each digital image to the correct size.
Each page becomes a digital image file. If you opt for the Full Page Scan, we use industry-grade scanners to take a high quality image of each page as a whole.
Or remove the photos from the album at home and use our Photo Print Digitisation Service >>
If you’re concerned about the prints getting damaged when we remove them at EachMoment HQ, or expired adhesives have turned your pristinely organised albums into folders of haphazard loose images, then simply gather the prints into a more postage friendly container and send them to us. with our Prints conversion process, we scan photos and digitise them using high-end scanners to reproduce a digital version of each print. Our subtle post-processing procedure will also enhance each scanned photo to achieve the most authentic recreation.
We take care of your photos
How We Digitise Your Albums
Preparation and Care
We want you to know that we take the utmost care with your photo albums.
Cleaning has to be done in order to ensure the best quality during digitisation and this is done on a case-by-case basis to select the best cleaning method. Where images are very damaged or have adhesives have been applied, careful use of chemicals may be used. But for most occasions, the gentle removal of residue and dust is achieved with an airgun, microfibre cloths and brushes.
If you opt for each image to be scanned individually, rather than whole page scans, then we will delicately remove each photo from the album and reposition them after scanning. We aim to return your albums to you in the same condition it was when you first entrusted them to us.
Editing and post-processing
In post-processing, we use digital tools to clean up anything we couldn’t manage with hand tools, such as scratches and stubborn residue. At this stage we may use subtle colour correction and restoration methods to recreate and maintain the authentic quality of the image. We may also employ more intensive editing tools to enhance the image or work to remove more extensive damage where possible.
Cataloguing
Once conversion is complete, we will do our best to recreate the experience of the original album in its digital form. That means putting images and folders in chronological order where possible and preserving the flow of the visual narrative by keeping images in the same order you had them before.
If you send us multiple albums, we will create a separate folder for each one and clearly label them so your memories don’t get muddled. If you’ve got lots to convert, we recommend making use of our Memory Box offers to make sure you get the best deal when converting your photos.
Why should I digitise my photo albums?
Whilst a picture can outlast a fading memory, unfortunately photographs cannot last forever. If your albums are in that miscellaneous storage room (i.e. the shed, garage or attic), they are going to experience fluctuating temperatures and possibly even be affected by the elements, when the rain seeps in through that hole you’ve been meaning to fix. Water damage and mould are likely in such conditions. And because popular photo-developing technology has evolved over the decades, the age of the prints themselves will also affect the lifetime of your photo albums. For example, older developing processes used less stable dyes meaning that prints made before the 1980s are likely to degrade faster, particularly coloured photos.
What’s more, the photo album itself could be speeding up the damage. The tidy packets we used to collect from the local Vistaprint were designed to care for your photos, but not all commercially sold photo albums are designed with the same care in mind. Many such albums will use adhesive pages and films to hold the photos in place, as well as dyed paper on which to present them. And if you are a keen scrapbooker, you may well have adorned your images with additional decorative details. Chemicals in the glues and coloured paper can stain and decompose the images, increasing the rate of deterioration.
Contact Us
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You can send us an email at [email protected].
You can give us a call on 01603 291 552.
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We’re always happy to help.