If you’re like many Americans, you have countless boxes taking up space in closets, the basement or a storage unit that are filled with irreplaceable photos and videos. Even if you’ve never been much of a shutterbug, you’ve likely collected thousands of snapshots, slides and negatives. Click-happy photographers and self-appointed family historians could easily have accumulated more than 10,000 nondigital images.

The biggest problem with analog technology is that the images (and video and sound) deteriorate over time, dooming those Kodak moments as surely as the fortunes of the once-dominant film company. As photographs age, dyes in the ink fade and discolor, and the paper often yellows or becomes brittle. Tape used for video recordings decays as the magnetic particles lose their charge and the protective layer of film absorbs moisture. Even if it has been years since you last thumbed through your photos or loaded your videos for a nostalgic viewing, they have been degraded by air, light, temperature changes and humidity.

Prints and slides

When choosing a photo-digitizing service, pay attention to the resolution the scanning process will deliver. To capture the details of an image and be able to crop or enlarge it without sacrificing quality, you’ll generally want digital images that are 600 dots per inch for prints and at least 3,000 dpi for slides and negatives.

Images that are saved in JPEG format will be good enough to share on Facebook or to remember Aunt Agnes’s face. But if you plan to heavily edit the photos or use them to print professional-quality photo books, you’ll want the images in uncompressed TIFF files to maintain their integrity. Scanning services may charge extra for these files, which include all of the image data captured during scanning. Note, though, that TIFF files take up more space on your hard drive or in the cloud.

If you have a lot of images you want to convert, a digitizing service such as FotoBridge can do the job for a reasonable price. You mail a box of your photos to the company’s scanning center, where it will scan the images and make small fixes, such as removing red-eye or correcting the color on images that have faded or shifted. The company will return the originals and digital files, usually on DVD or CD, several weeks later, typically with door-to-door tracking along the way…

 

Kiplinger’s