If you’ve ever marveled at the detail of a mother or grandmothers old albums and scrapbooks or spent time at Michael’s choosing all the paper and elements that are just right to make your own – then you know that they are a labor of love. We see a lot of different albums and scrapbooks come to EverPresent and each one has been painstakingly handcrafted, cherished and preserved through generations. The books brought in by this client are no exception and many of them were in excellent condition.
In this archive we were excited to see several scrapbooks with the photos held in by adhesive photo corners as well as a larger, more formal album with heavy board pages and a single opening on each page for the photo. They ranged in size from very small to very large and several of them had beautiful leather covers.
Is digitizing these items different than photos?
In our previous post we went over the clients choices for their photos and even though many of those decisions apply to their albums and scrapbooks, there were some different decisions to be made for them as well:
- Full Page Scans — rather than doing individual crops of the photos in the scrapbooks, they elected to have each page scanned to preserve the captions and detail of the original
- Scan covers — several of the books had detailed front covers they wanted included with the page scans
- Captions — because they opted for full page scans, the captions were preserved in the image so decided to not include them in the file name
All of the album pages and covers will also be included in the choices they made for their final deliverables:
- 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 client’s 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.
Even though there are different decisions to be made, the process is quite similar. Every page in the albums and scrapbooks is cleaned and dusted by our white-gloved technicians before being placed on a flatbed. Because the client requested full page scans, the scan will be cropped to the full page rather than the photo. The full page is then optimized before going through our quality control process.
If you’d like to learn more about our album and scrapbook scanning process, visit this page.
