For years I’ve thought about scanning all of my photos from yesteryear. Although I have a nice scanner, it’s not designed for photos and, in general, photos tend to be a bit grainy and sometimes off in color– especially if you’re like me and always printed them at Walmart back in the day. Apparently negatives can be scanned much more effectively: not only are they higher-resolution, but the colors are more “true”.
After some thought and online research, I decided to hand over my entire collection of negatives to ScanCafe. They have generally positive reviews, are recommended in several discussions about photo scanning, and have reasonable prices. I spent the entire afternoon today organizing the negatives we’ve had stored in a fireproof box for over a decade. They’re all in little sandwich bags, carefully labeled and ready to ship to ScanCafe. On Monday I’ll drop off the box at UPS and wait 6-8 weeks for the scans to come back on DVD. I had originally thought I had maybe a thousand photos. I was wrong. The final tally: almost 1,100 negatives… with roughly 4 photos per negative strip, that comes to well over four thousand photos. Wow.
I admit it’s a little scary sending all of these precious memories out the door, but I feel like in the end it’ll be worth it. Moreover, once I have the scans in hand, it’s going to be fun to go through them with the kids… and also email them to friends and family for a good laugh.