Benefits of Professionally Digitizing Your Family Memories

July 20, 2021

Photos and videos are a great way to capture and relive your fondest memories. And vintage family photos provide a glimpse into bygone eras and relatives you never knew.

The reality is that too often, photos, videos and home movies are neglected and suffer as a result. They’re put in shoeboxes, corners of damp basements, or on the top shelf of warm closets — where they’re forgotten, fade, and deteriorate. Getting these digitized professionally is a great way to preserve precious recollections.

Why Time Isn’t Kind to Printed Photos, Videos, and Movies

It may seem like old photos and VHS tapes are a dime a dozen at thrift and antique shops, flea markets, and estate sales or maybe even buried in attics. But more often than not, you’ve probably stumbled on piles of photos with a lot of issues, such as fading, green or yellow hues, rips, water stains, or even mold. Or perhaps you found VHS tapes that didn’t play well. Home movies stored unseen for decades can be so brittle, they break the moment you try to play them—assuming you even have a working movie projector. Unfortunately, time is the enemy for many media formats. Some common problems they face are:

Fading and color shifts: This common issue affects prints, slides, and movies, due to ink instability, exposure to the sun, or simply age.
Dust: Old negatives, slides, and film reels can collect excessive dust, making them vulnerable to permanent scratches.
Mold: Storing photos and film reels in damp, humid places can cause mildew and mold, damaging them beyond repair.
Water: Slides separate from mounts, emulsion (the image) dissolves or sticks together, ink runs, and stains ruin surfaces. And of course, water can cause mold to grow.
Temperature fluctuations: High heat and humidity followed by cold, dry weather (like in basements or attics) causes cracking and separation of the image from its paper base.
Loss of magnetic charge: Video formats of all types are magnetic and whether they lose their change gradually due to age or by accident, the quality of the picture can suffer or they won’t play at all.
Vinegar syndrome: Acetate film bases sometimes will experience what is called vinegar syndrome when the base shrinks faster than the rest of the film. It gets brittle and warped, in addition to smelling like vinegar.

How to Preserve Family Memories

The best way to preserve media is to prevent damage in the first place. While proper storage and handling can prevent the most extreme damage, some deterioration is inevitable even under the best circumstances.

So whether you inherited old family photo albums, home movies, or have favorite videotapes from the 1980s, converting them to a forever medium is the most practical and economical method for preserving these memories. If you have the time, money, and interest in undertaking a major DIY project, you can digitize photos and convert videotapes to digital at home. But another, option would be to get them professionally digitized.

What is The Best Way to Convert Printed Photos to Digital?

Investing in the time and money to scan photos to digital yourself is really an investment. So for many, a photo digitizing service is the best way to preserve your photos and other family memories.

Here at ScanDigital, we use state-of-the-art scanning equipment that has been thoroughly tested to ensure the best results.

When you send your photos, film, and videos to ScanDigital, our dedicated technicians will handle your memories as if they belong to them. As part of our process, we manually scan the media, perform individual color correction of every scene, remove scratches and red-eyes, enhance the original photos and offer our final digitized products at a high enough resolution so you can enlarge them later.

We make digitizing old media easy at ScanDigital, with the highest-quality, convenient, and trustworthy services. Our vast experience ensures that services are performed correctly, efficiently, and affordably!