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The holidays are one of the few times when we still pull out the old family albums and childhood videos to share with the people we love. As long as they're out, it's also a good time to work on digitizing those memories—not just to protect the originals, but to share them on Facebook, Instagram, or sites like Picasa or Snapfish. Once digitized, you can even use the images to create new albums or other gifts.
You could outsource that work to a service, but you may already have most of the gear to do it yourself—and what you don't have is pretty easy and affordable to get. Here's everything you need to convert your old media into modern digital files and then prepare them for sharing with your friends and family.
Choose your photo scanner
Scanner technology has changed little over the years, so any scanner or multifunction printer (which has an integrated scanner) purchased even five or more years ago should be more than adequate for the job of converting your old photos. Just be sure it has a flatbed scanning surface, rather than a sheetfeeder that pulls media through a slot. Old pictures tend to suffer from warps, small tears, and surface blemishes that could cause a sheetfed scanner to jam—or worse, destroy the print.
Photo: Michael Homnick
The Epson Perfection V550 can digitize slides and negatives as well as photos.
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