Digitizing my photos with ScanCafe
- February 22nd, 2010
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For about the last 10 years, I’ve been carrying around an overstuffed shoebox filled mostly with my old-school point-and-shoot photos from the 90s. Like my CDs and DVDs, I’ve had a longstanding ambition to digitize them once and for all.
There are some good pictures in this bunch. Not really for their photographic quality, but I’ve got about 6-7 rolls of film representing my trip to China in ‘92, and another 3-4 rolls from a trip to Italy in ‘93. There are a good 100 or so photos of my road trip with Steve out to the Grand Canyon in ‘98, and there are a ton of single photos people have given me from plays and other various events I’ve been a part of. (There’s even a handful of slides some photographer gave me from the infamous Summer of ‘97 at Camp Longhorn.) I was never really a take-pictures kind of guy, but the photos I do have, I want to save. Obviously.
I took my first step towards doing this about 3 years ago, when I bought a semi-fancy flatbed scanner that had excellent resolution and attachments to scan my negatives slides.
Since there are a ton of landscapes and travel-type photos in the lot, I wanted to make sure I could preserve as much of the original frames as possible. I had no idea how much would be possible to keep, but I wanted the max. I also wanted to do whatever I could to color-correct and remove dust and scratches. Essentially it boiled down to a simple goal: digitize to the best quality possible, and restore what’s there.
This is totally more easily said than actually done. I took a few sample prints and scanned them in. I tried a ton of settings, using the automatic features like dust & scratch removal and color-correction. Cropping was supposed to happen automatically. None of it really worked all that great. I tried using Ross’s photo scanner from a different manufacturer. It was better, but it wasn’t really satisfying my perfectionist ambitions.
After screwing around with the store-bought scanners for a while, I came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to work the way I wanted it.
Even if I could find a formula for getting great results out of my dusty and fading old prints and negatives, I still would have to spend a good while on each picture in Photoshop, removing scratches and dust and probably hairs and fingerprints and whatever else most of these photos needed. But after a couple of hours of fooling around with a couple of sample photos, I realized that even a week’s worth of experience was not going to leave me confident that I’d done a good-enough job at this.
And the way I figure it, I want to do this once, and exactly once. At the end, I need to be satisfied, or it’s a completely wasted effort.
I realized I wasn’t going to be happy scanning them myself. So I sought out professional help. I did a little research at first, googling up some results for “photo scanning service” and “professional scan photos” and the like.
After several hours of poring through user reviews and articles, I’ve decided to take a chance on a company called ScanCafe. There are a good 4-5 companies that offer services like ScanCafe’s, but they set themselves apart by promising much better quality than their competitors, for about the same price. They use many of the same professional scanners and software that the other major players use, but they have a single technician handle your entire order, personally reviewing the quality of the scans, and correcting for dust and scratches and color, basically giving a huge leg up on quality that you can’t get from an automated process. Which they’re able to do, of course, by outsourcing the human labor element of their work to Bangalore.
I kind of recoiled a bit when coming across that fact. But that’s just my natural concern at the distance involved; I’ve personally worked on projects with people from Bangalore, so I know that there are a ton of technically skilled and competent people in the city who’d be capable of doing the work. And from the reviews and articles I read, it seems like the great majority of people are really happy with the results they’re getting back.
So I’m taking a little bit of a chance by having my memories shipped off to the other side of the globe. But what I’m going to get back ought to make the risk worth it.
Several things I like about ScanCafe, so far: 1) Their website is very clear and easy to use. 2) Their ordering process and general business model make it easy to just throw my photos into a box and send it without having to worry too much about the details.
This is really important. I have a ton of negatives and prints, and I’m not sure which are going to end up scanned better in the end. But fortunately, I can just throw them all in a box, and then later, I can review the results, keeping only the scans I want. (Subject to a 50% minimum, of course, but that’s totally reasonable.) Part of me feels a little guilty for sending them an order that I know is going to be a little on the heavy side, but they really encourage you to just throw your stuff in a box and send it on, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
But in the end, I expect to spend only about $200 on the whole process — something that would have taken me a week or more to do myself. I’m thrilled that this kind of thing is possible, and I’m excited to find out how it actually works out for my stuff.
I’m sending the box out tomorrow morning. I’ll be following up with updates as they come in.

