After some advice about copies of photos

[tn17]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping you can give me a bit of a steer about how to best get high quality copies made of some old photos.

My mother recently passed and now there's a few family members interested in her mother's photo album. I don't want to divide it up if I can help it, and whichever way that sorts itself out, some people are going to want copies.

Does anyone have any advice about getting copies made? Most of the photos are quite small (think... polaroid size, black and white), with a couple of what look like hand-coloured pictures that are really quite lovely.

The obvious things seem to me to be to either take pictures of the pictures or scan them, but I also feel that there's a good way and many bad ways to do this. Another consideration is that while the photos are in decent shape (i.e. good condition, but not always well-composed or clear), the album itself is fragile, and it'd be good to avoid too much additional damage.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated.

[McGroger]

Scanning them at a high resolution should give you good results for most. Any you're not happy with, post them on here for further advice or perhaps digital restoring/cleaning/improvement if that's appropriate.
Peter

[jim1]

Agree scanning is best.
Taking photos raises issues with glare & off angle
images.
Assuming they are not stuck in you can carefully remove them
remembering where they came from as photos were usually put in groups.
They may also have extra info on the back.
I scan at 600 dpi but higher if they are particularly small also
in RGB even if they are B & W.
I reference them by number starting with the 1st. in the album (0001)
& so on.

[Biggles50]

Scan them.

I have done just this with our 120+ year old family album, plus I scanned the front and back of the Album.

I edited the image of each photo in Photoshop.

Then I recreated the Album in Publisher and used the scans of the front and back covers as the first and last page.  Added each of the scans to the document and then exported it as a PDF.  The file size of the PDF is quite large but it works well and it is there for future generations and Cousins have a copy of the PDF.

I have also sent specific images to relations via Dropbox as the file size is to greatto sent via eMail.

[Albufera32]

I would also advise scanning.

Some years ago I scanned all my mother's old photos from several albums she had. Those albums were a bit like ringbinders, so we simply took each page out and scanned the entire page, then I cropped them in photoshop to get each picture individually as well as keeping the whole page scans.

[Jool]

If you take the photos out of the album, take a photo of each page first so you know where to put them back.

[David Nicoll]

Hi, scanning is good and I have scanned a good few.

However my current approach is to use a decent compact camera that supports remote shutter by phone app or similar.

You get 20 megapixel resolution, which having done things the slow way is more than enough.

Use a tripod, with extender arm, and you can set things up with ideal lighting.

It has the great advantage that you don't have to take the pictures out of the album.

I have some that are pretty much unscannable. Glued in to a bound album….

I have got some good images this way.

Total cost about the same as a scanner and you get a good camera out of it.

And it is very much faster than scanning.

[Lisa in California]

You most likely are intending to include names with the photos…I thought the following worked well:

Years ago, a relative sent several pages of photocopied photographs (some dating to the early 1900s).  Every page was numbered, every photo had a number written above the image.  Included in the packet was a handwritten paper, with details about each photo, such as
    Page 1  1-Dad, Uncle Stu    2-Mum and dad at the cottage    3-Dad and Grandmother Sarah?

The relative tried to give as much detail as possible and added question marks when she wasn’t sure who was in the photo.

Now, as I’m thinking about the details and photos, I realize that I need to add to her details by including the cottage’s location, adding James Stuart where Uncle Stu was written (he was known by his middle name), etc.

The photos are one of my most treasured items, especially since I know the names of the ancestors and their siblings.