Making Old Photo Albums into Digital Books

An old photo album or scrapbook is a gem! Maybe it’s got photos of your mom as a baby, or your grandpa holding your 7-year-old hand as you walk down the beach.

Even a gem needs polishing and cleaning.

Old photo albums and scrapbooks, by their very nature of being both old and one-of-a-kind, need two things: 1- preserving from age deterioration, and 2- the ability to share it.

Depending on the photo book you have, it may also need one other thing (before it’s too late!): words! Contrary to the popular adage, photos are only worth a thousand words if you know why the photo was taken, who is in it, and what was happening. Recording the story behind the photo gives photos value.

Take, for example, the photo of the old scrapbook shown here. If this book belonged to you, it would be a treasure, but it would be a treasure that you couldn’t enjoy. These photos would be worthless to you unless you knew that the bottom left photo was your grandmother with her sister at a church picnic. Otherwise, they really mean nothing to you. Much like the way you”re looking at this very scrapbook right now!

So let’s talk about polishing those old photo album gems! Let’s talk about preserving from deterioration, making a one-of-a-kind copy shareable, and possibly adding the photos’ stories.

First: Preserve from Deterioration

What your photos are physically touching matters, and where they have been stored matters, too. Some books may have used materials such as paper or adhesive that contains acid and/or lignin which damage photos over time. Those “magnetic” pages of the ’70s and ’80s are not really magnetic, of course, but the sticky glue that makes those books self-adhesive is highly acidic and will eat away at the photos. If those photo albums have been stored somewhere with extreme temperatures and humidity changes, such as an attic, there’s an extra layer of deterioration going on.

To preserve from these damaging issues, you can remove all the offending parties (magnetic pages, old materials, bring books out of the garage or attic, etc.) and give those photos new physical homes like acid-free pages and a shelf in your living room. However, making them into digital books allows you to skip those steps if you like and simply digitize the pages.

Digitizing pages means scanning them. You can do this yourself or hire professionals to do it.

IF YOU DO YOUR OWN SCANNING:

• Be sure you scan photos or pages at a minimum of 300 dpi. 600 dpi (dots per inch) is even better.
• Some photo processing centers (like Walmart or Walgreens) have scanners available.  You sit down at the kiosk and do your own scanning, then save your scanned photos to a thumb drive.  Contact individual photo processing centers for cost information and availability.
• Many FamilySearch locations have scanners that are free to use. FamilySearch locations are inside some churches of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints around the world.  This map will allow you to find a FamilySearch location near you with its specific hours of operation. Call ahead to see if they have a scanner you can use.
• Set aside some time to do this! A one-inch stack of photos is about 100 photos and takes around 5-6 hours to scan using a flatbed scanner.

IF YOU PREFER PROFESSIONAL SCANNING:

• Again, you need quality scans. You want to make sure your book and your photos are both safeguarded and treated with care! I recommend this scanning service (which can accommodate large scans like 12×12 that are too big for most home scanners). This is my experience using it (multiple times).

Second: Make Pages into Shareable Books (and Journal the Story)

Digitized photos and album pages are great because they are rescued, so now they’re ready to be put back together as a book. This is fantastic because what was once one-of-a-kind can now be given to all the grandkids or to all your siblings.

There’s a fantastic way to put those precious scans into a high-quality book that will last for years and years to come that I highly recommend. You can either use AutoBook to quickly put all the pages into a digital book, then go through each page to add some text, rearranging those pages as you like, or use this Big Picture template which is ready for full-page scans or photos that you’ll place in yourself page by page however you like.

I haven’t had a need to do this myself yet, but I know several people who have. You can see one woman talk about her amazing, darling results at this 1-minute video clip, and here’s a 13-minute video tutorial that breaks down the process of making pages into a digital, shareable book.

An Extra Bonus: It’s Extra Shareable

And, speaking of shareable, there’s an extra bonus here if you’ve used the recommendations I’ve shared here.

That extra bonus is that the digital version of your book is also shareable. So, maybe you want to have your grandparents’ wedding book scanned and print it for yourself and your brother and your sister, then share just a link to the digital version with all your kids, nieces, and nephews. You can do that free of cost, and the best part is that your digital version isn’t at risk of loss. (Some companies delete projects after a certain amount of time, but not this one.)

You can see what I mean about having a shareable digital version with this example below of a family yearbook I made a couple of years ago. I make one each year and print it, plus I have this digital version as a backup and as an easily-shareable option. This was made with my favorite digital scrapbooking software, so your photo scans from the 1980s or the 1890s will look quite different, of course, but the digital result is the same.

You can see all the pages of the book along the bottom which I have circled in purple. The share button is at the upper right, which I have circled in blue, and that gives me the option to share this book as a QR code or as a link.

Remember!

If your old photos, photo albums, or scrapbooks don’t have words, ASK! DO NOT DELAY. You never know when it will be too late to ask your dad or your grandma about what was happening in that photo, who is in it, and the story behind it.

Rescuing those unique, precious family photos from endangered media is an important thing to do just so they won’t disintegrate eventually, but having them more accessible now is a blessing that you can share! Win-win.

Don’t forget–I always love seeing what people accomplish as they preserve photos (and videos) and memories and stories, so I’d love to see here what you have to share! 🙂

For additional information, visit How to Convert Traditional Scrapbooks to Digital Books