We take a lot of digital photos, and free online storage options for those photos are available all over the place. From Dropbox, to OneDrive, to Flikr, and even Google Photos there are loads of places to store all of the selfies, food pics, and other assorted photos that our phones and digital cameras have allowed us to easily take.
But what about your old family photos? You know, the ones that had to be set up, taken on film, and developed? I’d wager that many of us (myself absolutely included) have a stash somewhere of photo albums, boxes of photos, slides, and negatives that are just sitting in storage, or collecting dust somewhere in your house. What would you do if those photos were suddenly gone?
That horrible possibility is ever-present. From flooded basements, to the wildfires that we’ve seen on the news, to the simple passing of time degrading the paper the photos are printed on there’s definitely a clock ticking on these photos. A digital backup is definitely a great way to avoid any of these disasters, and I’ve personally considered going through and scanning many of the photos that I have stored away but that is just a daunting task that always seems to get put off for another day (or in my case, weeks and months).
Thankfully there are other options. ScanMyPhotos.com is a service that does, well, exactly what their name says. The company has been in business for over 25 years and have really gotten the whole scanning thing down. They will handle your photos, slides, negatives, and even video transfer and photo restoration. Their most popular service is photo scanning and there are even a few different ways to handle that. You can simply walk into their office with some photos, walk out with scanned copies of those photos, and that will cost you $.16 per photo.
The best option is probably the pre-paid photo box. For $145 (which includes 300 DPI scanning and free 3-way shipping) they’ll send you a USPS flat-rate box that you can fill with photos. You’ll be able to get roughly 1,800 photos in there which ends up at a cost of $.08 per photo at the default 300 DPI resolution. Simply box up your photos, send them in, and the team over at ScanMyPhotos.com will get to work.
They’ve got some heavy duty scanners and can plow through your pictures pretty quickly. They’ve gotten the turnaround time on this service down to only a few days which is honestly incredible. Your photos will be scanned, saved to dvd, and returned to you. From there, you’ll have a digital set of photos that can easily be uploaded to any of the photo sharing services mentioned.
We’ll be taking a deeper look at exactly how the service runs (as soon as I can unbury the photo albums, boxes of photos, etc. that I have stashed) and we’ll provide a full review in the future. In the mean time, take a look at ScanMyPhotos.com and see if they’ll fit your photo scanning needs.
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
