We digitize every format
Photo Scanning Service Pricing
Standard Slides
- 2000-4000 dpi on professional scanners
- Unpack & repack of carousels
- Dust removal via cloth, brush & compressed air
- Ordered, titled & numbered
Standard Photos
- 600 dpi on professional scanners
- Ordered, titled and numbered
- 3 level human eye quality control
- Dust removal, cleaning & orientation
Albums & Scrapbooks
$2.99
Starting @ per page
- 4 scanning methods: 300-600 dpi
- Returned as is or in organized photo boxes
- Dust removal & cleaning by hand
- Album handling fees may apply
A $40 service fee applies to all orders. This service fee provides for safe handling procedures including: intake, item coding, physical & digital storage, quality checks by senior technicians and packaging. Extras & Details
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Is there any format that you don’t digitize?
We are not aware of any image format that our picture digitizing service can’t handle. We are rare in that we can handle the most delicate and obscure scanning photographs service, including glass mounted negatives, fragile letters and more. The singular exception is that we are not a film lab and so do not handle undeveloped rolls of film. For information on where you can still get old film developed, click here.
Why do delicate images and images in albums cost more?
Simply put, delicate photos, letters, frames and bound items take more time and usually require additional or more expensive equipment. If items are curled, we may have to carefully apply glass with light pressure and do the scan via overhead photography. Old scrapbooks may require us to re-adhere images that are falling apart. Alternatively, the glue and adhesive dirties our scanners at each pass, meaning we have to clean after each scan to avoid dirtying your scans. And in all cases, we have to take extra time to determine which methodology will yield the safest, best and most cost effective result.
What file type do I get with my images?
When digitizing photos, our default photo scans are .jpeg files. Scans of loose prints, framed and other delicate or oversized items or bound items like photo albums and scrapbooks are scanned at 600DPI. Films and transparencies are scanned at 2000DPI, with the option for DPI upgrades to 4000 and beyond. For advanced users looking to do their own editing, or with rigid archival requirements, we do offer .TIFF files for an additional charge. .TIFF files are the kind of thing where you know if you need it. If you don’t, you should not order it even though EverPresent makes more money off this service. The files are 30-60 times larger and will slow down a computer hard drive and photo viewing software for users who are not prepared for these larger, advanced files.
Can my scanned archive be combined with my more recent digital photos?
Certainly. We have an entire Digital Photo Organizing team devoted to working with digital photos, with services ranging from deduplication to declutter to various forms of face and topic tagging. We are happy to do remote support to incorporate your scanned photo archive into your current cloud account or desktop photo organizer for easy sharing. Or, we can work with you to easily apply a common advanced organizing scheme to your entire photo archive, whether it started as digital or you used our picture digitizing service for an old fashioned print photograph.
How will my digitized photos look when I share them online?
We digitize photos at 600 DPI high resolution using the best scanners and overall technology, so they will look very good online and on social media. On small screens, on mobile apps or when viewing as email attachments on mobile devices, the images will look extremely crisp. The digital files are large and will easily fill up the screens. On larger screens, like on computers, the image scans will also look great. One way to think about it is that if we scan a 4×6 photo print at high resolution, it will look great at 5×7 and even 8×10 – but you can only blow up a photo print so much. Whereas with negatives you can blow up to print huge signs, you can only go so far with prints that in most cases were printed at well below 300 ppi.
Do you make my scans look better than my prints?
Yes. It is almost a certainty that your prints have lost some quality over time. Generally, the major issues are surface blemishes like dust or grease film or similar – or – basic fading over time. Our normal photo scanning services address this by cleaning photos before we scan with microfiber cloth, and then spending time post-scan in our editing platform doing some corrections on fading and exposure. In addition to our picture digitizing service we also offer two levels of advanced improvements to further photo restoration. For a fraction of our baseline scanning cost we offer Image Enhancement services where we spend additional time on each photo, with the primary mission being to correct and enhance color. Lastly, we also offer an Advanced Image Repair photo scanning service for situations where there are creases, cracks, tears and other major bits of damage to the photos. This service is billed on an hourly basis and it’s rare that clients invest in it for their whole scanning project. Fortunately, we do the work for you in the sense that your quality control technician reviews your archive and proactively recommends candidates for this service so you can decide later. We know not to recommend this level of care for a generic photo of Epcot Center or a random photo of friends. But if we notice a rare wedding photo or family reunion photo thay may deserve the investment, we’ll bring it to your attention so you can preserve it well into the future.
How large can I reprint my scans?
This is a much more complicated question for film scans like slides or negatives, where there’s enough inherent pixels to do big blow up prints as long as the scanning resolution is significant. But for standard prints, we are limited to the original print quality. For example, we could scan an old print at 4,000 DPI, but since it was only printed at 100-300 DPI, we’d be wasting a lot of your scanning budget for no gain. That said, since we’re doing high quality 600 DPI scans to assure we get every pixel in digital format, it’s generally safe to go up by one size. For example, you can likely print a 4×6 as a 5×7 – or an 8×10 as an 11×14 – and not notice any relevant deterioration in sharpness in your copies. That said, as each size goes up, the ratios are slightly different, so you’ll have to be careful about image cropping so you don’t accidentally blow up your prints and have empty space or major parts of the scan cropped off. If you’re not sure how things are going to come out, the good news is that printing scans is very cheap. If you visit CVS or Shutterfly or many other websites and photo printing apps, you can order an online print in minutes for pennies. It’s worth testing things out sometimes on a few of the scans before investing in hundreds or thousands of reprints.
How do you recommend that I store my newly digitized photos?
We will always provide you with a hard drive (usually a 4GB flash drive) and a link to a private cloud storage application that is free for 180 days. In general, we recommend that you always use three forms of backup – and that one of those backups NOT be at your home. For example, you might keep a cloud version as your offsite backup, and the originals and the USB drive as your onsite backups. We recommend that you use this approach to back up all of your media, be it documents, home movies, digital documents, digital photos taken on your cameras or phones, etc. And it is ideal to consolidate all of your items into a single device so that you don’t misplace any of your content. If you need any help or tips on getting your digital life organized as one of your next projects, please feel free to reach out to our Digital Organizing team, who are global experts in this area.
The Technical Fine Print
There are certain folks who like to read the fine print before they make an important decision. This section is for you. It’s not a light read, but will give you a look under the hood at how the photo digitizing service process works. 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 – Integrity of Our Image Scans
Integrity may seem like an odd place to start, but it’s the most important thing. Many of our competitors work backwards in their process toward what’s easy for them. As a result, folks are often forced to remove photos from their safe containers (like an album or frame), group them by like sizes (getting the photographs out of order), and then scanning them in an automated machine in an even stack (meaning some photos are oriented wrong and more delicate items are simply rejected). At EverPresent, we don’t subscribe to any of this. Your photos are scanned in the order. Someone put them in that order for a reason, so we preserve it when we digitize photos. If a photo is currently safe in a frame or in an album sleeve, please get it to us that way. It’s the safest approach, and we’ll return it as is. Lastly, we check the scans after digitizing. If we need to rotate a photo so it’s correctly oriented, we do. Ditto for assuring photos scanned straight and are cropped correctly. We also do a manual check of the physical items after scanning to assure nothing was missed. It seems simple, but the most fundamental reason to choose EverPresent is that we don’t cut corners. Your photos will all be scanned, even if they are challenging, and we’ll keep them in order and handle them in the safest way.
Quality Factor #2 – Scanning Equipment
Scanning equipment really matters, and it comes down to two key variables: 1) Can we get an exquisite scan of the image with a high degree of sharpness and accurate color? 2) Can we get these great results for all types of photographs, even if they are delicate or challenging? The answer to this is yes, but it means you need a lot of different equipment and the experience to know when to use which scanners.
First, a few obvious points. We clean photographs before we scan so that dust doesn’t scan into the photos, and we clean the scanners regularly so that debris doesn’t get into the scans either. That means wiping lenses, cleaning rollers, replacing the lighting elements regularly and more. Additionally, all of our scanners offer high DPI, so if your prints are at 100-300 DPI as is common, we are scanning at 600 DPI. Our slide and film scanning is covered on another page, but we’re at 2,000 to 4,000 DPI for those digitizing processes.
Second, let’s talk about the nuances of the scanners and the situations we need to accommodate:
- Flatbed Scanners and Oversized Flatbed Scanners: Flatbed scanners are an important part of what we do. They are a workhorse, high quality solution for delicate items that can handle pressure from the top, but cannot be put through a roller or are too large for a high speed scanning system. Great examples of where we use flatbed scanners are letters, thicker photo prints from the 1920’s to 1940’s, and curling photos, and the smaller square or oval photos that we see from time to time. We also have a special set of flatbed scanners with a glass edge for dealing with certain bound items with exceptionally tight bindings where content is tight in the margin. We use four different flatbed scanner models at EverPresent from Epson and Plustek, all of which are commercial grade machines that cost thousands of dollars.
- Overhead Scanners: Overhead scanners refer to a sophisticated camera element that images the photos from above. These scanners are most appropriate for very large items like a full newspaper page, or scrapbooks or bound items where items will fall out or be damaged if we turn over the book into a flatbed. This methodology is also ideal for any three dimensional scanning situation, such as dealing with a picture in a frame or a photograph of an important memento, like war medals. Our overhead scanning technology has been designed in-house and relies on Nikon and Canon imaging elements. All of our overhead scanning rigs cost tens of thousands of dollars.
- Feed Scanners: Feed scanners are appropriate for a minority of what we see, but can be effective if used with care. The quality is exquisite as long as these scanners are only used for the appropriate media, and only used in the semi-automated mode. In our experience feed scanners will skip images if they are used in fully automatic modes in most cases and/or jam and damage photos. The best uses of feed scanners are relatively recent prints between 4×6 and 8×10 in size that are in near-mint condition – or – 35mm slides and negatives that are also in excellent condition. We primarily use Kodak and Nikon devices with customized modifications, and each of our scan stations in this arena costs over $20,000 to build.
Quality Factor #3 – Archive Organization
We scan almost 100,000 images every week, and if we returned them in a disorganized fashion, we’d just be replacing one problem with another. So when we digitize pictures, we bring digital organizing along for the ride:
- Folders: All groupings that we receive get their own folders, whether it’s a photo envelope, an album, a slide box, or a grouping that you put together. We scan everything in order, and then number the photos in order. So, for example, if you give us an album labeled “Disney World 1986” there will be a folder titled as such, and each photo will be labeled “Disney World 1986_1″…”Disney World 1986_2” and so on.
- Handwriting and Notes: If someone took the time to annotate your photos, we are happy to preserve that work digitally. We can manually transcribe written notes into the caption metadata in your digitized pictures. Alternatively, we can also scan the backs of the images and provide the imagery of the handwriting adjacent to the scanned image.
- Advanced Organizing: We offer various advanced organizing options for your scanned photos, including highlighting, date tagging, topic tagging, geo tagging and face tagging. The goal of these services is to make it easy to find photos you want in larger scanned archives. This is generally appropriate for archives of 3,000 or more images, and your consultant at EverPresent will make recommendations. You need not be prepared for this upfront.
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