Two girls in front of a log cabin with matching shorts and blouses and matching wide-eyed grins. Open air bungalows and tents on the beach. Synchronized swimming lessons in vintage suits and bathing caps. These are just some of the scenes our team came across in the recently completed girls summer camp archive from the early 1900’s.
Maintaining the Integrity of the Original
When you have such a big collection of older photos it is common to see a wide variety of sizes and characteristics between each photo. Many of them were tinted sepia, and some were black and white. Almost all of them had white borders and writing on the front or back and there were a lot of decisions to be made about how the photos would be handled.
At EverPresent, our goal is make these decisions as easy to make as possible. After reviewing their options with their consultant , the client decided on the following for their photos:
- 600dpi JPEG files of each photo
- Raw files of each photo
- Cropped borders — this means that all of photos with white borders would be scanned and then the borders cropped out leaving only the image
- Scan backs — the client elected to have the backs scanned of any photo that had a handwritten sentence on it
- Captions in file names — any other writing in the margins or front of photo was included in the file name of the image. This makes it easy to identify photos and organize them
Other plans were made for their albums and scrapbooks that we will explore in our next post! They opted to have their final project delivered in two ways:
- USB — all of the JPEG and raw files of the clients scanned were put onto a single 64GB USB
- Private family website — in addition to their USB, all of the clients scans were uploaded to their personal cloud storage site which is free for 90 days and easily shared with family and friends using the private password provided at the time of pick up.
What happens to everything next? Do you mail them out?
Of course not! All of EverPresent’s work is done 100% locally at our production site in Watertown, MA. We have over 40 trained members of our team and this project was personally handled by one of our most experienced technicians!
Our technicians wear white gloves to handle all of our client materials. Each photo was cleaned of dust and checked for imperfections before being placed on a flatbed scanner. After the scan is complete the technician will crop the borders, transcribe any captions into the file name and do some basic optimization. It is important that our clients get the best scan possible.
After the photos are successfully scanned, optimized and organized the technician will move onto the albums. Find out tomorrow why we are the best in the country for scanning albums and scrapbooks to digital.
Click here if you want to learn more about our photo scanning process.
View some of the beautiful images from this archive.
