How to Digitize Every Aspect of Your Family History
By: Thomas Smith
Tags: Gadgets, Digital Life, Family, Technology, Photography

How to Digitize Every Aspect of Your Family History

Photo: N-Photo Magazine/Getty Images

Reports from the recent fires in California include many stories of families who lost their photographs and other heirlooms to wildfires. In a best-case scenario, insurance can make a family whole again financially after a disaster, and help them find new housing. But it can never replace these lost treasures. In rare cases — like an inspiring story of a wedding photo returned to its owners after a wildfire, or a project to restore photos damaged in Hurricane Harvey — families get some portion of their history back. But after many natural disasters, entire family histories are lost forever. As climate change threatens increasingly intense weather worldwide, it’s more crucial than ever to protect your family’s memories from natural disasters or other losses. One way to do that is to digitize them.

I work in photography and digital media and co-founded a company that digitizes and licenses historical media. We work with everyone from large organizations like Duke University to individual collectors. If you can think of a type of photo, film, or physical artifact, we’ve probably digitized it. Here are my recommendations for the best gadgets and strategies to digitize and protect your family’s history — based on more than a decade of industry experience.

When most families look to digitize their family history, they start with photographs. Personally, I have photos of my family going back to the 1870s, as well as some gems from the 1970s, like an infamous shot of my late mother-in-law Wendy during a motorcycle phase. Printed photographs are one of the easiest kinds of media to digitize, so they’re a great place to start.

If you have a few hundred photos and a limited budget, using a flatbed scanner to digitize your family photos is a great option. Even budget models like the Epson Perfection V19 ($69.99) can take great scans of printed photographs. A slight upgrade to Epson’s V600 ($229.99) buys you higher resolution and better optics. I’ve owned several V600s and routinely carried them into historical archives when doing on-site scanning. Epson’s software is great for basic jobs and makes the scanning process easy.

If you’re digitizing photos using a flatbed, expect to do a lot of placing photos on the platen (the glass surface inside the scanner) and waiting. A high-resolution scan on the V600 can easily take more than a minute. So while flatbeds are cheap and produce good quality images, they’re definitely not speedy.

While auto-feed tech has improved tremendously over time, sheet-feed scanners still occasionally damage photos.

If you have a large photo archive (over 2,000 photos) or you’re planning to scan photos for other people, consider getting a professional sheet-feed photo scanner. My company uses the Kodak PS50 ($2,095), which was originally designed for professional photo labs, and is no longer sold. The Epson FF-680W, though, is its descendant in nearly every significant way. It has the same resolution as the PS50, the same scanning speed (about one to two seconds per photo), and a similar capacity. The biggest difference is the price — the FF-680W costs $599, or nearly $1,500 less than the PS50. The FF-680W is popular and well-reviewed and is a solid choice for scanning large photo collections.

Even a $599 scanner isn’t cheap. But for scanning lots of printed photos, professional sheet-feed scanners can’t be beat. You can drop in around 30 photos at once, press a button, and the scanner will digitize the whole pile at a high resolution in about one to two minutes. My company has used sheet feed scanners to digitize thousands of photos in a single day.

The only caveat is that — while auto-feed tech has improved tremendously over time — sheet-feed scanners still occasionally damage photos. I’d estimate that this happens with around one in 100 photos on our PS50. Sometimes the scanner crinkles an edge, or the photo gets drawn in wrong and folded over. Photos are rarely damaged beyond use, but if you’re scanning incredibly valuable or one-of-a-kind photos, a flatbed is still the safest option. If you’re handling very sensitive photographs — or you just want to look like a badass museum curator from the movies — invest in a pair of lintless white archival gloves, which prevent the oils from your skin from damaging your artifacts.

Many family collections also contain slides and negatives. The most common family collections we see are boxes of mounted 35 mm slides, often dating back as far as the 1950s. These slides are beautiful when properly preserved. Kodachrome slides are, in my opinion, the best photographic technology ever invented, with colors so vivid they inspired a Paul Simon song.

Digitizing them properly can be a challenge, though. Slides can get dusty, and because they’re so small, any dust is exaggerated in the scanning process. Getting colors and exposure just right can also take some practice. The good news is that — as with printed photos — digitizing slides doesn’t require super high-end equipment. The Epson Perfection V600 includes special mounts for slides, as well as a backlight, which is necessary to illuminate them during scanning. You can easily scan 35 mm slides using Epson’s software.

Whenever you’re scanning slides or film, preparing your originals properly is the most important step. Get a professional microfiber film cleaning cloth, and gently wipe off slides that are very dusty, working your way slowly from left to right, wiping in one direction only. If a slide appears especially damaged or is very valuable, avoid any physical contact, and clean the dust off with a rocket blower or slide duster instead. Wipe down the platen of your scanner each time you load slides, too, to make sure dust doesn’t build up there.

With some slides, you can enable technology on your scanner called Digital ICE. This tech shines infrared light through your slides, detecting dust and then digitally removing it from your final images automatically. On certain kinds of slides, it works like magic, and can save you hours of manual cleaning time. On others (like Kodachrome) it doesn’t work at all, since pigments in the slides block infrared light. Experiment with using Digital ICE on sample slides from your collection. Make sure to zoom all the way in — sometimes Digital ICE results in glowing, distorted edges on incompatible slides, which aren’t always obvious fully zoomed out.

Even though scanning slides doesn’t require super high-end equipment, using a higher-end scanner and better software can transform your slides into truly transcendent digital images. If you have the budget, I recommend the Epson Perfection V850 professional scanner ($1,149) paired with dedicated scanning software from Silverfast. Silverfast has an obscene learning curve, but once you master it, it produces the absolute best scans I’ve seen.

Here is an example of a 35 mm Kodachrome slide scanned on a V850 with Silverfast, showing Mexico City in 1952.

Photo courtesy of Gado Images

You can also invest in tech to scan your slide collection much faster. The PowerSlide X from Pacific Image ($1,199) uses a projector-style carousel to automatically digitize a batch of up to 100 slides in a row, at the same resolutions a flatbed can achieve. Each scan is still slow (our X takes about five minutes per scan), but because you can load up the X and walk away while it scans autonomously, it makes slide scanning projects much easier. SlideSnap also makes an automatic batch slide scanner for $3,495 that digitizes up to 1,800 slides per hour using an integrated digital camera. I haven’t tested it personally, but it’s a popular tool in the industry.

If you’re scanning photographic negatives instead of slides, a flatbed is likely your best bet. You can buy standalone negative scanners, but I’ve found that a good flatbed works just as well. The Epson V850 Pro can digitize 18 negatives at a time using a snap-in mounting system. That means that for a typical 36 exposure roll of film, you only have to load up the scanner twice. I use a V850 for all my modern self-developed film work, and for scanning historical negatives.

One of the most common questions my company gets is “what DPI should my photos be?” DPI stands for dots per inch (it’s often used interchangeably with PPI, or points per inch). Most people seem to have somehow picked up the idea that 300 DPI represents a “high resolution” image.

I’ll let you in on a well-kept industry secret: DPI is meaningless. Or rather, DPI alone is meaningless. The metric just refers to the number of pixels (both horizontally and vertically) that you’ve captured per inch of material you’ve scanned. It tells you nothing about the size or quality of your final image — unless you also specify the physical size of the item you scanned.

Imagine that I told you I ate 100% of the food in my fridge for breakfast. You’d probably be pretty impressed. Now imagine if I clarified, and said that my fridge contained only a single egg. You’d probably be less impressed. DPI works the same way. If I scanned a giant map at 300 DPI, it would yield an impressively large image. But if I scanned a tiny 16 mm film frame at the same DPI setting, the image it yielded would be so tiny it would barely be usable.

Rather than looking at DPI, professionals look at the pixel dimensions of an image. To find the pixel dimensions, multiply the image’s height and width in pixels, and then divide by 1,000,000 to get the image’s pixel dimensions in megapixels. If the image is over 17 megapixels, it meets industry standards for a high-resolution image.

For example, if your image is 2000 x 3000 pixels, it would be 2,000 * 3,000 /1,000,000 = six megapixels. That’s too small to meet standards for a high-resolution image. But if it was 4,000 * 5,000 / 1,000,000 = 20 megapixels, you’d be golden.

If you smell a vinegar smell around your old films, they’re probably already experiencing acetic acid degradation or Vinegar Syndrome.

When scanning, choose a DPI setting that yields a final image with pixel dimensions over 17 megapixels. As a ballpark, that means 300 DPI for letter-sized or larger artifacts, 1,200 DPI for small photographs, and 4,200 DPI or more for slides and negatives. Make sure to choose a JPEG setting that maximizes quality, too, to get the clearest scans.

In addition to photos, slides, and negatives, many family history collections contain films and footage. These could be in the form of 8 mm or 16 mm films or Super 8 films. Old films are especially powerful when you restore them and see them — sometimes for the first time in 50 plus years. Many 8 mm family films were shot on Kodachrome, and their colors and vibrancy can be stunning, even more than 70 years after they were taken.

Old films physically degrade, though, so it’s important to scan them now if you have them. If you smell a vinegar smell around your old films, they’re probably already experiencing acetic acid degradation or Vinegar Syndrome. In less than 20 years, they’ll be gone. Make sure to scan them right away, assuming they’re not already too wrinkled or brittle to work with. Follow guidelines and safety standards to protect your skin when you’re scanning them.

For pro-grade scans, Moviestuff offers a desktop film scanner that retails for $8,495 and works with 8 mm, 16 mm, and many other film formats. My company uses an earlier model of Moviestuff’s scanner to scan 1950s- and 1960s-era 8 mm films. For a more budget-friendly option, many people use the Wolverine Data Film2Digital scanner ($399).

An even cheaper option — if you still have a projector sitting around — is to project your films on a white wall and take a video of them with your phone. This can yield a rough “scan” to share with friends and family, but it’s not a perfect solution. The framerate of your phone’s camera and the projector won’t be in sync, so you’ll likely see a strobe effect in your video. And old projectors get hot. They can easily damage your films, especially if they jam.

Another solution for old films — and photos, slides, and negatives as well — is to use an outside service to do your scanning. There are a few things to watch out for here. Ideally, you want to find a service that scans your materials domestically, rather than sending them to a scanning center halfway around the world. The further your precious materials have to travel, the more likely they are to get lost.

Travel itself is also rough on historical artifacts — the powerful X-ray machines used in airports can cause films to fog and degrade, and temperature and humidity changes can harm your materials. If you do choose to use an outside scanning service, I recommend shipping everything to them overnight, and waiting until a cold (but not snowy) part of the year. This minimizes (though doesn’t eliminate) the risk of damage or loss.

For basic consumer scanning, I recommend GoPhoto. They scan 8 mm and 16 mm films, slides, negatives, and more. They’ll charge you about $0.50 per scan (or about $0.75 for professional resolution), and $0.28 per foot for scanning home movies on film (roughly $4 per minute of film scanned). For professional scanning, I recommend Creekside Digital. They charge $5+ per scan, but will digitize your most precious artifacts to museum-quality standards.

What about if your family history collection includes large artifacts, like a poster, certificate, Ketubah, or map? Or what if it contains photos pasted into a large album? Most larger artifacts won’t fit into a standard flatbed scanner. A good alternative is to buy (or rent) a high-quality digital camera, mount it on a copy stand, and use it to photograph your large artifacts from above. My company has used this strategy to digitize large printed photos, newspaper pages, and the like.

Another great option is the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 ($795 retail, but often available for less). The SV600 pans a motorized, high-resolution camera over your artifacts, scanning them at resolutions comparable to a flatbed scanner. It can automatically correct for the skew introduced by the pages of a book, making it a great option for digitizing photos in an album. My company used an SV600 to scan the sketchbooks of artist Rex Brandt.

A budget alternative for big documents is the PhotoScan app from Google. It helps you take multiple photos of your large artifacts using your phone’s camera, which it merges into a single, high-resolution image. The app automatically removes glare and crops the image, too. The quality isn’t as good as a real overhead scanner, but it’s a great solution for quickly capturing big documents. I’ve also used it to quickly scan photos while visiting family members. No one wants to lug a scanner along for a social visit, and PhotoScan is a helpful alternative.

When you’re digitizing your family’s history, make sure to think beyond obvious materials. Photos, slides, and films are clearly targets for digitization. But what about family heirlooms, physical artifacts, and even the significant spaces that your family occupies? These can seem harder to digitize — but there are plenty of tech tools that can help.

You can’t physically clone family heirlooms. But there are plenty of ways to capture a physical object digitally. The simplest solution is to photograph your objects. Think about what objects are significant to your family. Some will be obvious — for me, these include a set of Shabbat candlesticks from the 1800s and my grandfather’s fountain pen.

Others may be less so. Photographing my late mother-in-law’s prized violin is an obvious choice. Photographing her electric can opener from the 1980s — with a cow motif that brought her immense pride — is less obvious. But the can opener is a no-less-significant heirloom for our family, and so I’ve made sure to document it. The significance of objects is highly personal — think about what objects matter to your family, and capture them digitally.

If you want to be future-proof, photograph your objects from all sides, and from multiple heights, with good lighting. Software like Autodesk’s Recap can already create a 3D model of an object using multiple 2D images, at a professional price point ($325 per year). Consumer options for creating 3D models from 2D photos are likely to improve substantially over time. A decade from now, it may be trivial to create a high-quality 3D model of your object using well-shot photos you take today. You may even be able to 3D print it in full color.

After digitizing your photographs or slides, you might be tempted to go all Marie Kondo and throw away the originals. Please, please, please don’t do this.

In addition to objects, think about physical spaces that are significant to your family. Your house itself is a great place to start. Because you likely spend hours per day in your home, it’s easy to forget to pause for a moment and document it. Houses change dramatically over time. Even if you’re still living in the same house in 30 years, the items you own, your paint and furniture styles, and much else will have changed. The same goes for towns — think about favorite restaurants, parks, and the like and consider documenting these as they appear today.

For physical spaces, one of the easiest digitization options is to start recording a video on your phone and then walk around a space, narrating what you’re seeing. One of our favorite family films from my wife’s family is a 1992 home movie where her parents drove all around Marin County, California, for two hours. They talked about the grocery stores they frequented, the office where her father worked, and the like. We spend a lot of time in Marin today, and it’s fascinating to see how things have changed in 30 years and to have a clear sense of our personal connection to the place.

To capture physical spaces, you can also use a 360-degree camera. In a single photograph, these cameras capture the entire scene around you, transforming it into a 360-degree panorama. You can scroll around within the panorama in a platform like Google Photos, or even view it in a VR headset like those from Oculus, giving the impression that you’ve stepped right back into the space you captured. I’ve used the Ricoh Theta line of 360-degree cameras for this purpose. It can be surprisingly emotional to step back into a space like your kid’s nursery, even if it’s a virtual version.

After digitizing your photographs or slides, you might be tempted to go all Marie Kondo and throw away the originals. Please, please, please don’t do this. Digitization is an imperfect solution. It creates a backup of your originals, but it is not a substitute for the originals themselves.

Digitization tech is constantly evolving. Any digitization you do today will capture, at best, a snapshot of your artifacts at this specific point in time. In some cases — like with films that are actively degrading — today’s snapshot may be the best copy of the original that you’ll ever get. But in most cases, digitization tech will improve. If you go back and scan your artifacts again in 15 years, you’ll get something totally different than what you’d get today.

For that reason, digitization of your family’s history is an ongoing process, not a one-time goal. If you discard your originals, you deny yourself the opportunity for your digital family history to evolve with advances in digitization tech. Kodachrome slides last 130+ years with almost no degradation. It’s hard to even imagine what solutions might exist for capturing them digitally 75 or 100 years from now.

If you digitized your history before and have already thrown away originals, don’t despair. New tech also offers ways to partially restore and improve scans taken using older technologies. My company has used the same tech behind real-life zoom and enhance to retroactively improve entire archives of photos scanned in the early 2000s, allowing them to meet today’s standards for resolution and quality. Topaz’s Gigapixel AI is the best solution I’ve found for doing this.

Digitization of your family’s history is an ongoing process, not a one-time goal.

In a world that feels like it’s full of threats, it’s scary to contemplate losing your family’s history. While digitization can’t replace your originals, it can create a backup in case the originals are lost. It can also make your family’s history far easier to engage with on a regular basis. You probably almost never pull out a slide projector and show off your family’s Ektachrome or Kodachrome slides. But if you digitize those slides, it’s super easy to upload a photo of grandma to your Google Drive and look at it whenever you want.

Digitization can also be a great way to share your history with others, and even jog memories from other members of your family. Sharing my own family photos in an email or Facebook post has elicited all kinds of stories from other family members, many of which I’d likely never have heard had I not uploaded a photo. Digitization can also be a great way to share your history between multiple family members. If everyone has access to your digital family archive, the specifics of who holds each original artifact matters a lot less.

Today’s technologies allow you to digitize almost anything — from a handful of photos, up to a collection of thousands of slides, films, objects, maps, and more. Consider the artifacts and objects that are most significant to your own family, grab the digitization gadgets that match your goals and budget, and start scanning.