How do I save photo albums and scrapbooks?

We understand that making photo albums and scrapbooks are a serious investment of both time and money. The hours of work result often result in family heirlooms that’ll be passed down through generations.

Unfortunately, there are risks to physical, fragile memories, such as:

• The natural aging process.
• The risk of disasters such as fire, flood or loss that put these treasures at risk.

Instead of worrying about how to save scrapbooks and photo albums, have us digitally scan scrapbooks into digital files. Our photo scanning service is able to scan photo albums to make digital photo copies, so you can have peace of mind knowing that the memories will be safe.

If you prefer sharing physical copies, no worries. You can use our photo scanning service, then print out the scanned pages as modern archival photo books to share with your loved ones. That way, our photoscan service can help with digital copies AND let you pass them on to future generations with re-printable physical copies.

We also offer photo printing to make such printed copies!

Lifespan of a scrapbook.

Because of the wide variety of materials used for scrapbooks and the common use of newspaper clippings and other items, the aging of a scrapbook is all over the map. Still, you can count on a few rules. Most modern scrapbooking after 1990 used archival materials. Although this doesn’t guarantee eternal life to the photos inside, these scrapbooks properly stored will probably last 30-50 years. Scrapbooks from WWII until the 1990’s usually gas chemicals that cause fading and discoloration of photographs. The faster you have them digitized, the better. Older scrapbooks from WWII and back are almost always extremely delicate. That paper usually has surpassed it’s predicted 75 year lifespan and you should consider yourself lucky to have them intact. We highly recommend meeting with an expert in older, ancestry scrapbooks and make a plan for immediate digitization of these treasures.

FREE help to organize your books

The first step is to identify the subject or date range of each album or scrapbook. If yours are already titled on the spine or the inside cover, good for you! That makes things quite a bit easier. If not, we look at the album type, sort by likely year and then look inside each album to get an estimated date range for each album. The title or date range is written on an index card and that card is put with he first page of each album. Fortunately, the pages and photos of scrapbooks and albums are usually placed chronologically and are pretty well-organized from the start. The maker of the album usually had a theme, event or time range in mind and built the album with a structure in mind. We preserve that structure in a way that not only keeps everything in order, but you can easily choose different pages from different books and create highly personalized phonebooks which are actually a combination of pages from different scrapbooks.

What do I get back?

Each scrapbook is scanned so you resulting 600 DPI file are full pages in sequential order. These files can be edited, pages isolated and images can be cropped out as individual photographs. Because the scan is a true 600 DPI x 600 DPI, even the individual photos can be enlarged to be seen on a 50” flatscreen. We return the original scrapbooks to you, Please be aware that the plastic needs to be removed before we scan and we often have to unbind and re-bind the books. We are good at this and we know how to take special care of antique and delicate items, but the handling can sometimes cause minimal damage. We will examine each scrapbook and discuss this with you before proceeding and call you during the scanning process if we have further concerns.

Why Now?

Here are the top reasons to scan your old photo albums and scrapbooks:

• Reduce clutter and reclaim some space.
• The ability to share the memories with family living out-of-town.
• Fading photographs, disintegrating albums and discolored background pages.
• Flexibility of having memories on optical media (DVD) and the superior experience of viewing them on a TV.
• The appeal of converting the album to a photobook

Our nationally competitive prices and accessible staff allow you personal service without losing your shirt. We preserve your scrapbook and album pages to high-quality Taiyo Yuden silver DVDs. To ensure even longer life, choose a 100 year gold archival DVD or a digital file back-up for a little extra.

Can I create a new book?

Scrapbook and album re-creation has become one of the most popular parts of our business. Once digitized, a treasured family scrapbook can be re-printed as an archival quality photobook with an expected lifespan for many generations into the future. Plus, you have the added benefit of editing the scrapbook to address missing photographs, adding captions or combining pages from different scrapbooks into your new archival photobook. You will be very pleased with the flexibility you will gain from this process.