300 DPI, 600 DPI, 1200 DPI… What should I do?

For most family snapshots, a 600 DPI scan will be more than enough. The photo file sizes are compact and the quality suitable for most every use. At 600 DPI, a typical 4”x6” photograph can be viewed on a 50” flat screen TV or reprinted as an 8”x12”.

Sometimes, you may need a higher resolution for a photo enlargement, restoration or archive quality scan. Don’t worry about figuring out which DPI to select; our team of experts will guide you to the proper photo scanning resolution for your needs.

FREE help organizing your photos

We have professional organizers on staff to help you. We provide in-home organizing services throughout the states of California, Nevada and Utah. We also travel throughout North America to help organize larger collections. This personalized process includes labeling, dating and physically preparing your photos for digitizing and long-term storage. Our regular fee is $125 per hour, plus travel expenses. If you are located in our three state region, we provide up to three hours of organizing service at no charge with orders of $1000 or more.

What do I get back?

That’s a great question. First, we will return your original photos in archival packaging, ready for long-term storage. The digital copies will be organized in the order given to us and foldered as instructed. We recommend using large index cards and/or ziplock bags to separate different groups of photos. You can write the name of the group on the index card and we will name the folder what you have written on the card. This makes the collection easy to navigate and sensible to the people you share it with. We will make you one set of archival quality DVDs and you can also ask us to make you USB flash drives, hard drives and a cloud upload. We suggest getting clear on your end goal and talking this out with us before you start organizing.

Can I organize my own photos?​

Yes you can! Ultimately, your organization system should be as close as possible to what you want to see on your computer. We recommend organizing chronologically whenever possible. Facial recognition and other software tools help you find photos of individual people. But, date order makes sense to everybody.

We recommend that before you start organizing that you give us a call for a pre-organizing phone meeting. We can answer questions, give suggestions and this will save you a lot of time. We are also happy to send you organizing supplies at no cost to you.

What about scrabooks and albums?​

The good news is that these are already organized! If you think about it, most albums and scrapbooks were created with some sort of plan and usually cover a specific topic or a specific period of time. If they are handled properly, your digital photo collection will be in perfect order. Here’s what we do:

We consider each album to be a group. So, digitally we create a folder on the computer and title it whatever you have named the album. Then, whether we remove the photos from the album or scan the full pages, they will show up in order inside your folder. This allows the user to feel like they are actually looking through the original album.

Because scrapbooks often contain items other than photographs and the photographs or sometimes cut into odd shapes, we will usually scan the entire page of the scrapbook. We scan at a full 600 dpi X 600 dpi resolution so the individual photos can be cropped out and still enlarged on a flat screen TV. Also, consider looking into our scrapbook re-creation program. This allows you to take important family photo albums and scrapbooks and give them to your loved ones as modern, archival quality photo books that will last for generations into the future.