Convert Photos to Digital

Printed photographs are often the only record of entire chapters of family history. Before digital cameras became common in the mid-2000s, every birthday party, holiday, and school portrait ended up as a physical print stuffed into a shoebox, album, or envelope. Many of these prints are one-of-a-kind. The negatives were lost years ago, and the photo lab that developed them closed down long since.

The problem is that printed photographs are constantly reacting with their environment. Exposure to daylight causes colours to fade, humidity encourages mould and foxing, and even the chemicals within the print itself continue to break down over decades. Colour prints from the 1970s and 1980s are particularly vulnerable, often developing a strong yellow or magenta cast. Once this happens, the original tones cannot be recovered from the print alone, but a good scan captured now preserves whatever detail remains.

We scan every print individually on professional flatbed scanners at 600 DPI as standard, which produces files large enough to reprint at double the original size with no loss of sharpness. Each image goes through a dust-removal pass and a manual colour-balance check. If your prints are faded, we can apply careful digital restoration to bring back some of the lost contrast and colour, though we always keep the original unedited scan as well, so nothing is lost.

Prints of any size are welcome, from wallet-sized portraits to A3 enlargements. We handle Polaroids, photo booth strips, and postcards too. If your photos are still in albums and you would rather not remove them, we can scan whole album pages. Just let us know when you place your order.