By Sanjay Bhagia · 1 November 2026
Old family photos are fragile in two ways. The prints fade, curl and get lost in house moves. And the knowledge of who's in them lives with a few people. Scanning fixes the first problem. Done well, it helps with the second too. This guide covers both.
What do you need before you start?
- The photos, gathered in one place. Don't sort them yet; just keep each box or album together.
- A scanner or a phone. More on choosing below.
- A soft brush or microfibre cloth to remove dust. Handle photos by their edges.
- A notebook or a spreadsheet for anything written on the backs, and anything people tell you.
- Somewhere to save the files, and a second place to back them up.
If photos are stuck into old "magnetic" albums with plastic sheets, don't force them out. Scan the whole page, then crop each photo afterwards. Photos can tear if you pull.
Should you use a scanner or a phone?
A flatbed scanner gives the best results. The light is even, there's no glare, and you control the resolution. Most home printers with a scanner lid are good enough for prints. For slides and negatives you need a scanner with a film holder, or a dedicated film scanner.
A phone is quicker and you already have one. It's the right choice when you're visiting a relative with three albums and an afternoon. Apps such as Google's PhotoScan take several shots of each print and combine them to remove glare, and crop and straighten as they go. The results are good for sharing, not as good as a scanner for printing large.
If you use a phone:
- Work in bright, even daylight, out of direct sun. Turn the flash off.
- Lay the photo flat on a dark, plain surface and hold the phone straight above it, parallel to the photo.
- Fill the frame with the photo instead of zooming in.
- For glossy prints, tilt the photo or move yourself until reflections disappear.
A good compromise: scan everything on a phone first, so nothing is lost, then rescan the important ones on a flatbed.
What resolution should you scan photos at?
Resolution is measured in dots per inch (dpi). Higher dpi captures more detail, and makes bigger files. Smaller originals need higher dpi, because you'll want to view them larger than they are.
| What you're scanning | Suggested resolution | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Standard prints (6×4 in, 5×7 in) | 600 dpi | Enough detail to print at twice the size and zoom in on faces. |
| Small prints (wallet, contact sheets, passport photos) | 1200 dpi | They're tiny, so they need more dots to enlarge. |
| Large prints (8×10 in and up) | 300–600 dpi | They're already big; more adds file size, not much detail. |
| 35 mm slides and negatives | 2400–4000 dpi | The frame is about 1.5 in wide, so it needs a lot of enlarging. |
| Letters, certificates, documents | 300–400 dpi | Enough to read clearly and print at full size. |
Scan in colour even for black-and-white photos. Colour scans keep the warm tones of old prints, and you can always convert to greyscale later. Turn off any automatic "dust removal" or "sharpening" for your master copies, so you have an untouched version to work from.
Which file format should you use?
- TIFF keeps every detail, with no compression loss. It's the archivist's choice for master copies, but files are large.
- JPEG at high quality (90% or above) looks the same to most eyes and is a fraction of the size. Every app and every relative can open it.
- PNG is lossless like TIFF and widely supported, but is less common for photos.
A sensible approach for most families: keep a master copy of each scan, untouched, in TIFF or high-quality JPEG. Make any edits, like cropping or fixing colours, on a copy. Never save over the master. If you restore a photo, keep the original scan next to the restored version.
How should you name scanned photo files?
Cameras and scanners name files like IMG_4471.jpg, which tells you nothing. A good name sorts itself into order and survives being emailed. Start with the date, year first, then a few words:
1956-04_lahore_wedding_ram-and-kamla_01.jpgc1962_karachi_beach_family.jpgwhen the year is a guess1970s_unknown_garden_three-children.jpgwhen you only know the decade
Use hyphens or underscores, not spaces or symbols. If a photo has writing on the back, scan the back too and name it the same with _back on the end. The handwriting is part of the record.
How do you add captions to scanned photos?
A photo without names loses most of its meaning in one generation. For each photo, try to record who is in it (left to right, full names, maiden names), where it was taken, roughly when, and who told you. Even "Kamla's sister, name unknown" is better than nothing, because someone else may fill the gap.
You can write captions into the file itself, in the description field most photo apps support. Be aware that many websites and chat apps strip that information out when photos are uploaded. Keep the captions somewhere else too: a spreadsheet, a document, or a family archive that stores captions with each photo.
How can you tell when an old photo was taken?
Undated photos can usually be narrowed down. Look for:
- Writing and stamps on the back. Photo labs often printed a date or a batch number on the back or the border.
- The print itself. Its size, shape, border and paper change over the decades, and someone who knows your family's albums will spot the pattern.
- People's ages. If you know a child's birth year, their apparent age dates the whole photo.
- Clothes, hairstyles, cars and buildings. These change quickly and are often easy to place within a decade.
- Events. A wedding, a new house, a baby who appears in the next album.
Write "circa" or "c." when you're estimating. A careful guess, marked as one, is more useful than no date.
How should you back up scanned photos?
A common rule of thumb is 3-2-1: three copies of everything, on at least two different kinds of storage (say, a computer and an external drive), with one copy somewhere other than your home (a cloud service or a relative's house). Hard drives fail, phones get lost, and houses flood. Check every year or so that your backups still open.
Keep the original prints too. Store them flat in acid-free boxes or sleeves, somewhere cool, dry and dark. Attics, garages and basements are the worst places, because of heat and damp.
How do you share digitized photos with family?
Sending photos in a family chat is quick, but they're usually compressed, and they scroll away within days. Shared cloud folders keep the full files, but nobody knows who's in each photo, and folders get messy as people add to them.
What works best is a place where each photo keeps its caption, date and names, and where relatives can add what they know. Sharing scans is also the fastest way to identify unknown faces: post the mystery photos and ask.
This is what we built Kumbaa for. It's a private archive for one family: you add the scans, Kumbaa finds the faces in your browser and suggests people once you've named them, and each person's page gathers every photo they're in. If you've restored a photo, upload the original scan alongside it and the family gets a before/after slider. Relatives can download any original. Keep your own master copies and backups too: no single place should be the only copy.
Next: how to organize family photos once they're scanned.