EverPresent is the national leader in photo album and scrapbook scanning. These are some of the most treasured and unique family items that exist; they come in all shapes and sizes and are often very delicate. We use a human touch from start to finish in order to create a digital version of the photo album or scrapbook that does justice to the original. Here are four techniques that we use to convert photo albums and scrapbooks to digital:
1. A popular form of album is designed with each photo in an individual clear plastic sleeve. Some of our clients are comfortable removing these photos themselves and just giving us the photos to scan. But this is not ideal if you want to preserve the album in its exact layout after digitizing. In these cases, our technicians will diligently remove each photo, scan it and then put it back in the exact same slot it was in before. This way, our clients can hand us their albums and be assured that they will be digitized in exact order, and that the originals will come back looking the same too.
2.Some albums are actually too delicate to scan. We go over everything with the client before hand so that we can identify beforehand if something is likely fragile and will require special treatment. In some cases, these fragile items are not too fragile for our usual techniques, but in other cases we have to take special measures in order to digitize these precious family memories. When we run into photo albums or scrapbooks are too delicate to scan, we will carefully photograph each page in our no-touch studio, providing a high quality image of the album page. From there, we can either crop down to the individual images on the page, or provide the client with the whole page as the digital version.
3. Many photo albums and just about every single scrapbook has something special to say just by the way in which it was put together. Sometimes these can be old family recipe books accumulated from past generations or a hand made scrapbook with photos of the whole family. In these cases, providing individual image scans doesn’t do justice to the scrapbook or photo album as a whole. In these cases, it’s much better to provide scans of the full page so that the time and effort it took to put these treasures together can be fully appreciated. In almost every single one of these cases, the layout is a deliberate quality of the work, not a byproduct. Our technicians handle these scrapbooks and photo albums with expert care. We digitize full pages and provide the high quality image scans back to the client. If needed, we can also crop down to individual photos and provide both the full-page image as well as the individual photos.
4. For the largest albums, there may not be the option for providing full-page images in just one scan. The process works much the same as a full-page scan. The difference in these cases is we scan each album or scrapbook page multiple times, each time a different sector of the page. We then digitally stitch together the pieces to re-create the page in the final archive. As with the regular full-page scans, we can crop down to individual photos as well, if needed.
Our options provide a path to digitizing any photo album or scrapbook. Our expert technicians are intimately familiar with these techniques as we have digitally converted thousands of photo albums and scrapbooks from across the country. Photo albums and scrapbooks are some of the most special family treasures, and we make it easy to preserve them for future generations to enjoy.
