Preserve And Share Your Old Photo Albums & Scrapbooks
One of the best ways to preserve your old photo albums or scrapbooks is to have them scanned. In some cases, as a photo organizer, I recommend that you take the photos out of the albums, scan them and then find a new, safer home for the pictures, like a new photo-safe album or an archival storage box.
However, there are other situations when you want to keep the albums intact. Maybe your grandmother has written on every page. Perhaps it’s your own wedding album, and you want it preserved as-is. Maybe your mom spent hours and hours creating a scrapbook with lots of unique papers, embellishments, and beautiful photos. In all of these instances, there is no reason to disassemble anything. Let’s scan it all to preserve it, back it up, and create the opportunity to make copies.
Let me share two projects I have worked on that are the perfect scenarios for scan and recreate in new beautiful photo books.
A Wedding Album Recreated
A very dear family friend asked me to scan her wedding album because she and her husband were getting ready to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. She wanted to be sure her photos were preserved and digitized so she could easily share them on social media.
Unlike wedding albums today, this was a small photo album with the pictures only measuring about 3”x4,” and of course, they had discolored with age. I carefully removed and scanned them on my Epson flatbed scanner and returned the photos to the original photo album. I did some minor color corrections to the digital versions, saved them on a USB drive, and returned the album and the drive to my friend. She was thrilled with the result.
What I didn’t tell her is that I was also creating a special surprise as my anniversary gift to them. I recreated their wedding album into a high-quality photo book from AdoramaPix (now Printique). It features a leather-look cover, much larger versions of the photos, and thicker pages. It was a hit!
Now the original album has been safely preserved, a new and improved version has been created, and, best of all, our friends love both of them!
Note: I initially wrote this blog post about a year ago. Since then the husband of this couple has passed away from Covid. I recently was able to see the wife and she told me how precious it was to her that I had done this work for her. This is a true of examples of my tag line “making memories matter.”
Dealing with Big, Bulky Scrapbooks
I’ve mentioned before on this blog that my family goes to the beach every summer and has done so almost every year since I was 5. It’s a special tradition for us, and over the years we have taken hundreds, probably thousands of photos, from these vacations.
In the early 2000s at the height of the Creative Memories scrapbooking days, my mom took some of these photos and created two large scrapbooks highlighting our times together at the beach starting in the mid-70s. For many years she would bring them to the beach, and we would enjoy reminiscing, laughing, and talking about our beachside vacations. But in time, this stopped because the 12”x12” scrapbooks were just too big and bulky and hard to carry around, at least on vacation.
Enter my new role as a photo organizer. I borrowed the scrapbooks from my mom, and I scanned every page of those two albums. Then I created a single 12”x12” photo book from Shutterfly that is basically an exact duplicate of the two original scrapbooks. Now the two big scrapbooks have been digitized, preserved, and reduced to one much thinner book. And if anyone in my family wants their own copy, all we have to do is order another one.
Scanning Your Photo Albums and Scrapbooks
Whether it’s an album you want to keep intact or a scrapbook that you want to preserve for prosperity, there are ways to scan and keep the original as is.
- Hire a professional photo organizer, like Good Life Photo Solutions, who has the proper scanning equipment.
- Call your local library, university library, or family history center to see if they have scanning equipment you can use.
- Purchase a large flatbed scanner like one from the Epson Perfection line.
- Use a high-quality camera to take a good photo of the scrapbook or album.
Have you considered digitizing your intact photo albums or scrapbooks? Comment below to tell me which one you’d tackle first.
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If you want to work with a photo organizer near you to help you organize and preserve your photos, contact us or visit The Photo Managers to find one in your area.
*This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you purchase from a link, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business. See my disclosure policy for full details.
Connect with Good Life Photo Solutions
Instagram • Good Life Photo Solutions
Facebook • Good Life Photo Solutions
Pinterest • Good Life Photo Solutions
Sign up for our newsletter
Email us. I’d love your feedback and questions! [email protected]
Want to Know More?
If you want to work with a photo organizer near you to help you organize and preserve your photos, contact us or visit The Photo Managers to find one in your area.
*This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you purchase from a link, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business. See my disclosure policy for full details.
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Such wonderful work. I love my actual books, but do worry about them surviving through the years. It’s wonderful what you can do!
Thanks, Anne! We put so much time and energy into our photo albums and scrapbooks that we think we’ve save the photos, but the extra step of preserving the album is also important! On my to-do list are my college albums.
You are speaking to me right now! I have been trying to figure out what to do with all my albums. I have several of them, and now I am thinking of digitizing the scrapbooks I created for my family. This post gives me some ideas. Thank you.
I love that you were able to enlarge the photos from the older style album. This was a double benefit – new and in good shape, but also easier to enjoy. I bet they LOVED that gift!
I hadn’t thought about scanning my scrapbooks. I’ll have to discuss that with my daughters (for whom I made multiples). It would require that larger scanner, but might be worth it. Especially since neither of them has space for the actual albums right now LOL!
My mother-in-law had massage photo albums. They are so heavy and really thick. Scanning them might make a lot of sense. This way, the photos would be better preserved, and family members that wanted could have their own copy. I also have some scrapbooks (not quite as thick or heavy) that might be candidates for scanning. Something to think about. Thank you for getting the wheels turning.
Andi, your post does a remarkable job showing just what can be done to take the old way of sharing photos and make it better. Too many people fear that digitizing photos just means they’ll be stored on computers, never to be seen again except when searching for a tax file or some email. But you’ve shown how how actual photo albums can have a new life and be delightful. My family look lots of photos in the 1960s and 1970s, and then NOBODY except me has taken a single photo since about 1980s. All of those photos were in thick albums that, due to the bulky arrangement, probably only stored 60 pictures per album, so entire bookshelf had fewer than 1000 photos from the Kennedy administration to the start of the Reagan era! Meanwhile, I took 4000 photos on a two-week trip to Italy! I’m going to keep your wisdom in mind as I approach my family photo albums!
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