Sunday, November 23, 2008

Photo and negative scanning

Want to join all your friends uploading old, sometimes embarrassing photos of your friends growing up to Facebook? Wanting revenge on that friend who put you senior H.S. photo, with big hair and leg warmers online?

Well, have I found the service for you.

ScanCafe is one of a dozen or more photo and negative scanning companies you can use. However, they are a little different.

First, they don't want you to pick specific negatives to send them, they suggest you send them all and let them scan them in. Then they present them online for you to choose which ones you want to keep. You go to their website, select the ones to keep. Then they create a DVD and mail it back to you.

This was really useful for those old photos where you took 2 or 3 of each scene 'just in case'. Now, just select the best one and skip the others.

They ship your negatives or photos to India, but that isn't a big deal any more. Heck UPS offers overnight to most places in India, so don't sweat it.

I've used them twice so far, sending around 600 negatives each time. Turn around was < 6 weeks each time. I haven't been going in any specific order, so when I get them back it takes about 30 minutes to sort them into the correct folders.

Some examples from Christmas 1995 :


(Chris, if you want a hi res one of this let me know and I'll zip one up.)

4 comments:

Chris D said...

You should be hearing from my attorney tomorrow.

overtly trite said...

very cool thanks Chris I have boxes of negatives including some old ones of my grandmother's that I would love to have on disc
by the way boys love those Bill Cosby sweaters

Mommy of 2 Girls said...

I cannot believe you posted this picture! I was about 300 pounds. Thankfully in 1998 I lost 150 pounds! Good God what I looked like!

Chris Curtin said...

Sorry, I was being a guy. I just noticed I had a picture of you guys so I uploaded it.

I can't figure out how to remove it, blogger is trashing the image when I try to remove it.

I'll see what I can do.