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The Technical Fine Print

We know that making the decision to hand off your special and treasured memories can be a difficult one. If you want to make sure you have all the details beforehand, this section is for you.

It will give you a little more insight into how our album scanning process goes. Our philosophy has always been simple: only offer a service if we can do it better and/or cheaper than the alternatives. If you can’t look in the mirror and meet that standard with a straight face, then don’t offer it at all.

Quality Factor #1– Expanding your options

Every album is unique and each photo in it was curated with care. Someone took the time to select each image, where its place was and what order it goes in. Perhaps a family member even took the time to scrawl captions of who, where and what the photos are of, adding ticket stubs and postcards in the mix. Here at EverPresent we offer the option to choose to preserve as little or as much as you want. Whether you just want the scans to save the individual images from your pages, or you want to preserve the full album in its entirety with viewable captions in each name of the computer files, we provide personalized customizable options for each of our clients. As with every project in any media that we digitize, we will always make sure that your memories end up in the same condition as we received them. So, even if we have to remove pictures from sleeves, sticky pages, or photo corners, you can rest assured that each image will end up back in its rightful place.

Quality Factor #2– Scanning Equipment

There are many different types of albums, and the age and condition of this media can vary quite a bit. The way we choose to scan an album is evaluated based on the type, condition of both the album and photos, as well as the client’s requests for full-page or individual scans. Regardless of the equipment used, every page, picture and scanner are carefully dusted to inhibit particles showing on scans, any plastic covering is also removed when the scan happens. All album scans are provided at 600 dpi, which is twice the number of dots per inch that photos are printed at, so you can rest assured that we aren’t degrading the amount of information during the digitizing process.

Flatbed Scanners – Flatbed scanners are an integral part of our technology at EverPresent, and are generally capable of handling almost any type of photographic media we see. When it comes to albums, flatbed scanners tend to be where particularly fiddly albums go, such as pages with photos that need to be removed from photo corners, or books that are too tightly bound for overhead scanning. All of our flatbed scanners are commercial-grade Epson scanners that cost thousands of dollars.

Overhead Scanners – Overhead scanner set-ups work by incorporating camera technology with overhead rigs that capture images from above. This technology makes it ideal for extra-large items such as unfolded newspapers, large albums, and full-page scans. This is the primary technology used to scan most types of albums. Each of these rigs cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars to create.

Feed Scanners – Sleeve albums in good enough condition (generally newer 4×6 prints) that allow the removal of photographs tend to go to our feed scanners. These batch-style scanners individually take in an image to scan allowing for quick digitizing without compromising quality. We use Kodak technology and each of our stations created to equip this includes pieces of equipment worth more than $20,000 a piece.

Quality Factor #3 – Organization and Additional Services

All jobs are quality-checked to ensure that all scans are in the correct place and the digital order matches the order of the physical images Each album will have its own individual folder on the digital archive within the title of the album. Folders will be ordered chronologically according to the dates labelled on the album, or numerically, if that’s how you have them organized. If you don’t have any specific labels, we will use our generic naming system to keep each album folder separate.

If you’d like to go a step further to preserve the information in your albums we can provide manually typed captions for your photos which can be preserved in the file name or metadata. Our digital organizing team can even set face tags for members or your family, geo-tags for searchable locations and add date-setting so images have digital time information within the file. Older photos may be flagged for our Advance Image Retouching service, where we provide photo restoration for an hourly fee.