Photo scanning services?

[Ron Hunter]

I've got two boxes of photos at home that I would like to digitize and incorporate into my Lightroom catalog. I have a scanner and could therefore do the digitizing myself, but obviously that would take a while.

I've heard about scanning services that scan a box of pictures for a flat fee. Can anyone recommend such a service?

[Bob]

Don't know any companies in your local area, but I do know one here in California. ScanMyPhotos in Irvine has been around about 25 years and does that type of scanning. A normal job is scanned at 300dpi but they will do 600dpi for a little extra.

[Chuck Engels]

I did 100's of my own. I liked being able to set key words and tags, clean them up a bit or remove some lines and scratches. In the end it took me months to do them all but I think it was worth it.

[Peru]

Only months, Chuck? It took me two years scanning negatives and photos and I didn't even do any cleaning up. I figure that I will do my adjustments as I need to use them.

Oh, and I'm not done, yet. I found some more...

[Kent Frost]

I've spent the last 2 years scanning family photos of both mine and my wife's. Her's had about 1,100, while my family's collection is somewhere near 4,000-5,000. Got her's done in the course of about a month, whereas my family's collection is still a work in progress. What I typically do is use the most manual settings I can possibly achieve with my 2 scanners, and throw as many photos on the bed as I can fit and scan them all at once. It leaves me with a lot of very - VERY - high resolution images with between 3 and 9 photos all in one JPG file, but I then crop them all out in Photoshop. The main thing is getting them scanned. Once they're on the computer, you can do what you want with them.

Also, I tend to have them scanned a bit flat on the levels so that all the available darks, mids, and highs are captured and can be properly edited.

https://www.flickr.com/gp/frostfamily417/9d8E1X

[Ron Hunter]

Thanks everyone. I got a 50% off deal from ScanMyPhotos for 600dpi scans of 1800 photos, along with their "photo soap" enhancement service and a USB drive with the photos, all for about $180 after the coupon.

Yes I could have done it myself, but it would have taken forever and I probably would have just given up at some point. Now I can just pull the photos into Lightroom and have fun!

I'll share my experience with them after everything is said and done.

[Chuck Engels]

Sounds good Ron, looking forward to your review of their services