Digitizing old scrapbooks

[tracydigigirl]

I've been wanting to 'digitize' my old paper scrapbooks for a while but I'm stuck on the best method. Between photographing and scanning, I've read that photographing is better/easier. I wonder, too, if there are companies that do this and produce a quality image.

Have any of you done this? How?

[sarahorton]

I scanned mine and then stitched them using ArcSoft scan-n-stitch. They look totally "real" - and people actually touch them to see if it's lumpy or not. LOL!

I don't know of any companies that do it, so I don't have any advice there.

[dorah]

I don't know if this will help you or not, but I took a class at 2ps creating a baby first year album last summer. Once I did my ds' first year I decided to go on and do up to the present. He is about to turn 18. Anyway some of my earliest pages are horrid to look back at so I completely redid those digitally and some of the later paper ones that I liked I recreated digitally. But I have some old ones that my grandmother made and I plan to photograph those as scanning can pull the glue through the photo on these old ones and cause spots of discoloration. I can remember going to her house and she would be sitting at a card table with her pan of homemade glue putting things in her books. She has old photos of family and newspaper articles which make a whole history of the town I grew up in. And thanks to her when I was working on family history I got a lot of information from her scrapbooks. Anyway sorry to be so long winded but I would think scanning would be easier on newer things but if you have anything old, the main idea is to preserve them.

[DebbieHodge]

I scan mine and stitch them in Photoshop. I've been creating pages that are 11.75 x 11.75 rather than 12x12 for a while now, so that I can do this with two scans comfortably. Then ...I often plop digital photos over the photos on the scanned page. And I also sometimes trim and/or resize the scanned layout a bit smaller and put it on top of a digital paper. For the last year I've been working on getting all of my paper pages scanned and onto Shutterfly --- and I've been working them into albums alongside digital pages.
here's an album at Shutterfly: http://community.shutterfly.com/gall...NXDhs3cg9ol5-O
and these pages are scanned paper pages. 3, 6-7, 9, 17, 31, 32

[AllynD]

If you are going to scan, invest in a good quality photo scanner.

[sarahorton]

I agree with Lynn. If you are going to go to the trouble of scanning your pages, you'll want to borrow or purchase a good photo scanner. They are fairly inexpensive these days - under $200.

Scanners are basically big digital cameras. There is really no difference between photographing your pages or scanning them as far as the archivability is concerned. One pass with the scanner is certainly no more damaging than setting your pages out in the sunshine and photographing them or setting off a bright flash to get the photo. Remember that a flash (and studio lights) release a huge amount of broad-spectrum light onto a concentrated area very quickly. Scanners release a narrower spectrum of light - a few watts of energy at best.

Light does damage photos, but it is cumulative and relatively slow. It generally occurs over a long period of exposure. UV light is the most dangerous, so if you hang a photo on your wall near a window you'll see degradation pretty quickly. Keeping your albums in dark, controlled storage areas will give you the greatest degree of (light) archivability. (Of course other things affect this as well, like acidity, etc.)

I wouldn't be too concerned about the adhesives melting - today's scanners are not hot and a few watts of light can't melt the adhesive.

That said, you wouldn't want to scan your photos hundreds of times, passing the light over them again and again and again. You wouldn't want to Xerox several hundred copies of them because you'd be passing the light over them hundreds of times. Theoretically, that could cause some damage. But if you are just scanning them once (or twice if you mess up on the first scan) it's certainly no worse than taking the photo out of the album and looking at it for a while by a window.