Over 200 Million Images Saved. Save Yours By Scanning Them To Digital. Get Started Now!
Your old photos are in danger--danger of fading away, danger of being forgotten, and danger of being lost or damaged in a natural disaster. Photo scanning with ScanCafe can save them, safely and affordably:
Simply send us your cherished photos. We begin the important task of scanning and converting them into high-quality digital images. Your memories are in expert hands from the moment we receive them.
Each photo is scanned then enhanced with our proprietary technology, which blends artificial intelligence with meticulous human oversight for superior quality. Your photos are processed within 3-4 weeks, or in as little as 10 days with our expedited service.
Relive and share your beautifully restored photo memories. Once scanned and corrected, they are available for digital download, USB drive, or external hard drive, ready to be cherished and shared for generations.
We know that your old photos are some of the most precious things you have (one of our customers wrote us once to tell us that the only thing she carried out of her home during a wildfire was her ScanCafe USB!). And the only reliable way to preserve these priceless memories is to convert your old photos to digital.
But spending hours scanning old photos spread across multiple shoeboxes is nobody's idea of fun. That's where our top-rated photo scanning service comes in. Given how much your photos mean to you, we know that when you send them to us to scan, you expect them to be treated carefully. We built our photo scanning service at ScanCafe with this in mind. We handle your photos by hand and treat them with care at every step of the way. To start with, we scan photos one at a time, without the use of auto-fed scanning machines that can mangle them. In our experience, this really is the best way to scan old photos.
Where our handcrafted quality really shines is in repairing your photos. Where other services rely only on software to process batches of your most important memories, we take a more personalized approach. Each photo you entrust to us is carefully processed through our proprietary system, which combines the precision of artificial intelligence with the discerning eye of a highly trained technician. This ensures unparalleled quality and restoration of your most important memories.
Essentially every photo we receive requires some correction for the effects of time. Photos on display are particularly subject to fading, and even those hidden away in photo albums are subject to color shifts (unless stored in subzero conditions), both from time and from possible reaction to the photo album itself. We routinely carry out the following fixes to make your digitized photos look their best.
At our standard level of service, we confidently address all the issues listed above - and more. With years of experience scanning millions of photos, we've honed our process to perfection, delivering outstanding quality at an incredible value, for just pennies per image. Most photos are revitalized with our standard service; however, for those rare cases requiring deeper attention, our robust restoration service is readily available.
Our photo scan service is not just affordable, it's much less expensive than many services with lower quality. We also give you the option of discarding scans (up to 20% of them) that you don't want to retain and that again helps to keep a lid on the final number in your bill. And yet we make sure that we are not cutting corners or compromising on quality in any way. So you don't have to make a hard choice between being able to afford to preserve all your memories, and being able to preserve them well. At ScanCafe, you can do both.
Most people think they can invest in a quality scanner and do the photo scanning themselves. They believe that if they gather all their photos from across shoeboxes and other places and start feeding them into a scanner, they can finish the project over a weekend.
Reality may prove to be a little different. There are significant hidden costs involved in trying to do this yourself. As this article indicates, the DIYer can expect to spend 7.5 minutes per image when scanning photos at home. That includes the time required for scanning as well as editing the digital image for color shifts, scratches, fading etc. And this is after they are past the learning curve involved with the process. According to reliable research, the average American adult has 3000 analog images in their possession. If you do the math and multiply that by 7.5, that's 22,500 minutes in total that are needed to complete the task! Put another way, that's 10 weeks or 47 Saturdays at 8 hours a day.
So, the DIY route may not really be the most cost-effective way to scan photos, especially when you are looking at a large collection. A better strategy might be to cull your photos to the extent that you can (remove duplicates, blurry prints, those that are not focused on anything in particular) and send it off to a reliable professional photo scanning service like ScanCafe who can get the job done - quickly and effectively
DPI is a common, often misunderstood technical term that stands for "dots per inch." DPI designates the number of pixels per linear inch that a scanner produces in a scan file. The higher the dpi, the larger the scan is in pixels and megabytes, which means larger files.
At ScanCafe, we think high resolution is important because you never know what scans might be used for in the future (e.g. making prints). In general, a scan needs to have high enough resolution to enlarge, print, and crop from the scan file. On the other hand, it's possible to scan with too high a resolution – in some cases, highly detailed scans can actually pick up and magnify the grain of the paper (if a print) or the film itself (if a negative or slide). We think our standard resolution of 3000 dpi for 35mm slides and negatives and 600 dpi for paper photos strikes the right balance.
Please only use secure and sturdy boxes to ship your precious images. DON’T use flimsy department store boxes (e.g. Macy's or Nordstrom), Kleenex boxes, thin paper/cardboard boxes, moving boxes, or shoeboxes. In addition, you should never use bubble mailers because the contents will likely be damaged. Always be careful to fully tape up the box on the top and bottom. The UPS store or your local post office has appropriate shipping materials. Here are UPS guidelines for proper packaging:
Soon after you update your cloud credentials, it will take 24-48 hours for your high-resolution images to get uploaded to your cloud account. You will receive an automated email as soon as the upload completes.
We use top-rated Epson 4490 flatbed scanners.
