Scanning in old negatives....

Most people have boxes, envelopes bags, etc… full of old pictures, negatives and slides. Now there are a few out there that do not dread tackling the task of organizing this mess, I am not one of those. I have all of my pictures sorted and categorized and some are even labeled but I have 3 boxes of negatives that I had no idea what to do with. I looked into getting a negative scanner but the cost was high and then there is the time it would take to scan everything in. So the next thing I did was start looking for services that scan them for you and put them on CD/DVD. At first I was not able to find one that was reasonably priced enough to want to use for the volume of negatives I have to get scanned.

Then I came across www.scancafe.com and not only was their price the lowest but they offer a few things I did not find on other sites. The most important being you only have to pay for the ones you choose to keep after they scanned (You have to keep at least 50% but that is very reasonable for what you get) So that made it even easier to use since I would not have to sort though all the negatives trying to find the ones I wanted to have scanned. I just grabbed a pile of about 900 and sent it in and got to sort through them online after they were all scanned. I kept 80% of what was scanned. I just got my DVD’s of photos today in the mail and decided to post some of them online since they are pretty funny. See if anyone looks familiar to you in the pictures…



Now I am packing up my second order which will be between 2000 -2500 negatives and includes all of my medium format negatives since they just started offering the service to scan those. It takes about 6-7 weeks from when you send your items off till you have the DVD with your scans and your originals back in hand so I figure it will take me about 1 year to get all the negatives scanned that I want to have scanned. Then I will move onto old pictures that I didn’t have the negatives for. Once I get all that done I will see if my grandmother (Yes the same one who said “shut-up fatty” to me on my mom’s birthday) wants to have her slides/pictures/negatives scanned and work with her to get that done. She has large boxes filled with pictures and slides. It would be great to get them scanned so that the rest of the family could have copies of everything. Especially the stuff from when my grandfather was still alive and racing cars.

So if you have been looking for a way to preserve your memories digitally you should definitely look into scancafe and see if it meets your needs. I am really happy with it so far. Now I have to start organizing all my scans but that is going to be fun since I will get to look through some fun old pictures.