What to do with all your old photos…

Back home in New York we have old family photo albums from our parents, and even grandparents. Add them to our own family albums, plus all the loose photos that never made it into an album, and that makes a large collection of photos describing and displaying our family, friends and history. What to do with it all? The answer for our modern times is to create a digital archive by scanning the photos and creating digital photo albums.

Over the past few years I scanned a good number of our family photos, but life gets in the way and the project never seems to get completed. I have been using a flatbed scanner — and while the quality of the scans is excellent, the process is very labor intensive. The scanner bed needs to be wiped off after each scan to avoid smudges and dust, and scanning high resolution images is a slow process, as is saving the images. 

The photos in the old family albums have been the most difficult to scan. Old photos deteriorate, fade, crack, turn yellow, stick together, and simply decay with age. Most of the photos were placed in albums using photo corners, and some of the adhesive has also decayed over time, making it difficult to remove, and later replace the images in the albums.

Recently I have been targeted by ads, mostly on Facebook, for mobile phone apps designed to create a digital archive using the phone as a scanner. As I use my iPhone to scan documents, with excellent results, I thought these apps would be worth further review. A big plus to using a mobile phone is that the photos would not have to be removed from the albums. After doing a little research I decided to try two apps — Heirloom (for both iOS and Android) and Pic Scanner (iOS only). 

Heirloom is completely free and is easy to use. The only drawback is that before using Heirloom you need to create an account, and all Heirloom scans are saved to the Heirloom cloud server. The uploaded scans are of a higher resolution than the copies saved directly on the phone. In order to use the higher resolution image, which you need if you plan to print, you must sign into your account and download the image to your computer.

Scanning the image is simple, and the streamlined interface is very easy to use. The app recognizes edges and automatically crops images. Once you scan an image, which is just like using the built-in Camera app, you can make simple edits and add a description, date, and location. In addition to saving to the Heirloom server and your device, you can share images with groups or send as email and text messages.

The second app I tried is Pic Scanner. The app is free to download, the first twelve scans are free and unlimited scanning comes at a cost of $2.99 via an in-app purchase. The app automatically detects edges, crops and saves images, and features elementary editing tools. Up to four images can be scanned at one time, and the app recognizes the individual photos. However, for higher resolution, the photos should be scanned individually. Excellent instructions are included with the app and on the publishers website. An outstanding feature of the app is a built-in leveling “ok” notice when the phone is level. I’ve found that one drawback with using an iPhone as a scanner is knowing when the phone is level for scanning. Pic Scanner handles that concern by telling you when the phone is level and ready to scan. When “ok” appears, simply press the shutter button and move on to the next photo.

Both Heirloom and Pic Scanner are excellent apps, but I found Pic Scanner to be the better choice. The only drawback was the automatic cropping, which can produce uneven results. When it does, it is a simple matter to create your own crop. The app works with both iPhones and iPads. For Android users, Heirloom should serve you well.

Setting up a digital archives of your family photographs creates a historical record for your children, grandchildren, and future generations. You will be able to share cherished moments and maybe they will see that yes, we were once young, vibrant and active —  and just maybe we really do have a lot in common.

To find out more about the apps visit for http://www.appinitio.com Pic Scanner and www.heirloom.net for Heirloom. If you are interested in creating your photo archives with a flatbed scanner, PC Magazine published an excellent article on the process — http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2429388,00.asp.

The State of Online Photo Editing and Storage …

How many of us are in possession of family photo albums dating back to the early part of the last century? Since the late 1890s, when Kodak introduced the first truly portable camera, memories have been captured on film, printed on photographic paper and lovingly saved in albums. If you are like me, you inherited photo albums from parents and grandparents, and for years you created your own family albums. Today, most of the photographs we take never become prints, but instead are saved, and displayed, in digital format. How do we keep them safe?

Back in the days when we took photos with film camera, there were limits to how many pictures we could take. Most rolls of film held 12, 24, or 36 exposures. Film was expensive, and was bulky to carry around. When you saw something you wanted to photograph, you usually took one, maybe two shots. Today, with digital photos, there is little thought given whether to take two or ten shots of one scene, just to be sure you get it exactly right. The iPhone even has a built in burst mode; hold your finger on the camera button and the camera continues to shoot photos until you lift your finger. With the ability to take so many photos, it is imperative that you sort through your images on a regular basis, keeping only the best and deleting the rest. When you have decided on the keepers, they should be saved to a local backup drive for safe keeping. Once upon a time you would have used floppy disks for your backups. It would have worked but was labor intensive and required a large number of floppy disks. Today you can use a USB flash drive, also know as thumb drive. Flash drives have become very reasonably priced and an eight gigabyte drive can easily store up to 1,000 four megabyte images.

For added safety digital photos should be stored in more than one location and today cloud storage is the best option. Last week I wrote about Amazon’s Prime Photo service, which is included with an Amazon Prime subscription. Three other possible alternatives are Google Photos, Apple iCloud, and Flickr.

Google Photos (photos.google.com) is the free successor to the popular photo editing application Picasa, which will be phased out over the next few months. Google Photos offer unlimited cloud storage for both digital photographs and videos. The service offers sharing options, organizes photos by months or days, rudimentary editing, and a automated feature, Assistant, which includes face and location recognition. The service can be accessed exclusively online, or by downloading a desktop iOS or Android app. There is a 16 megapixel limit to the size of the images that can be stored, but this should not be a problem for most amateur photographers. Google Photos is accessible to anyone with a free, Google id. 

If you use Apple devices, iCloud offers four levels of service. Everyone who has an Apple ID receives 5 GB of free storage, which can be used to backup all types of files, including photos. The limit increases to 50 GB for $0.99 a month, 200 GB for $2.99 a month, and 1 TB (terabyte) for $9.99 a month (One terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, and the catalog of a serious photographer can easily exceed this amount of data). To make storing photos effortless, uses can choose to automatically upload every photo taken with an iPhone or iPad. While not for everyone, iCloud offers low cost and a seamless way to backup and store photos for users of iOS devices.

Another alternative is Flickr (www.flickr.com), the Yahoo service which offers 1 TB of free storage. For over ten years Flickr has been a premier photo storage, organizing and editing service for millions of users around the world. To access Flickr you need a free Yahoo ID, and it can be accessed exclusively online or with an iOS or Android app. Over the past decade, while several other cloud storage services closed up shop, Flickr has continued to evolve and keep pace with the times. Flickr also makes it extremely easy to share photos, both with private groups or with the community of Flickr users.   

Once you decide to use a cloud solution for the backup and storage of your digital photos, you are now creating the modern version of a family photo album. Of course with the rate of change today, modern may only be relevant until the next advancement in 2017! If anyone has any other topics of interest that they would like to see addressed in OnMouseClick, please email me at onmouseclick@digitalquinn.com.