Easy way to transfer tons of old photos to flash drive

Having scanned perhaps 10,000 prints, slides, and negatives, I can tell you it is a tedious and time consuming job. Fortunately, being retired with nothing else to do helps.

Now the real unanswered question: who will look at my pictures of me at the Grand Canyon in 1974 after I'm 6-footed? The likely answer is "nobody".

There is no easy way to convert printed photos to digital..

But I'd highly recommend having those digital photos in more than one spot. If your flash drive bites the dust, you'll regret it..

1492 wrote:
How valuable are your photos? I'm always a little leery of handing over priceless photos over to a third party service. Especially, if they are not a professional lab. You don't know if they will handle them properly to prevent damage, or if they may even be lost. Better IMO to do it yourself. .

reminds me of a trip I had to Egypt a number of years ago which also included giving some presentations to a branch of their government. not totally stupid I brought along a bunch of spare/seconds slides. they of course wanted to borrow/copy them and when I got them back it looked like they had put them through a wringer on an old washing machine. :)
bumpy

Costco once managed to completely lose a roll of film I had left along with 14 others. They had no record whatsoever of it other than a tag I had. I'm sure not at all interested in sending irreplaceable pix to India..

(Edit iPad spelling corrections... Again)

Bumpyroad wrote:
I set up my old digital camera on a copy stand and just slid the pictures onto the base. cumbersome but quicker than going thru a scan of each. I used my old "sony?" 724 mb? camera that put them on 3" floppy discs and the results were excellent. don't really need 18 gb pictures when you are copying a 4x5 picture vs a 1 mile x 1/2 mile landscape. can copy from floppy to HD/flash drive/CD etc.
bumpy

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I first considered Costco or Walgreen's, but don't like the idea of turning over our old, can not be replaced photos to some stranger.

So far, I'm leaning to your method of copying the photos. Whatever method I decide on (if any) will be time-consuming. And I wonder who, if anyone, will even bother to ever look at the photos - our kids- maybe; grandkids-weak maybe; great grandkids-don't have any yet- so probable not.

I appreciate all the advice and info from y'all.:)

How valuable are your photos? I'm always a little leery of handing over priceless photos over to a third party service. Especially, if they are not a professional lab. You don't know if they will handle them properly to prevent damage, or if they may even be lost. Better IMO to do it yourself.

Any scanner comes with software, or can be downloaded from the manufacturer's website, which is all you really need to scan photos yourself. I've seen many new, or lightly used scanners available at thrift stores such as Goodwill. Recently, picked up a 7,200dpi negative scanner for $15.

Most already have a scanner built into their inkjet or laser printers, but a negative type film scanner will likely give you the best overall quality.

BTW, you may want to scan your photos to an uncompressed format such as .tiff for archiving, but will use a substantially greater amount of disc space.

I think Costco may provide scanning service for a fee, if there's a store near you. Not positive if all stores offer.

If you haven't bought a printer in a long time, consider buying one with scan capability. I got an HP Envy a few years ago for my computer that also works wirelessly with my iPad. I use the scanner feature a lot. Time-consuming, but scan them and save to your hard drive. Then you can use them as you would a digital photo. You can then copy to a flash drive, DVD, external hard drive, etc.

By the way, I sent 100s of slides to a company called Scan Cafe to be scanned. It took about six weeks because they literally send them to India to be scanned, but I was glad to finally get it done without having to buy a slide scanner. Happy with the system and results. They do photos too. Also I think they convert old Super 8 type movies to DVDs.

I think places like Walgreens still copy photos over to CDs.

I set up my old digital camera on a copy stand and just slid the pictures onto the base. cumbersome but quicker than going thru a scan of each. I used my old "sony?" 724 mb? camera that put them on 3" floppy discs and the results were excellent. don't really need 18 gb pictures when you are copying a 4x5 picture vs a 1 mile x 1/2 mile landscape. can copy from floppy to HD/flash drive/CD etc.
bumpy

I use the Ion Docuscan. I bought from TechnoRV. If you go to their site you can see a video about how it works.

I can scan documents or pictures up to 8.5 x 11. I have thousands of pix and I have just started to scan them. This device scans onto a card and then you move the pix from the card to your computer via a slot or a card reader. I haven't had one problem with this device and it is so simple. . . even I can do it! It is very compact and you don't need to get the computer out to scan the pix in, they go directly to the card.
Good enough quality for me! At least now I have a chance to look at the pictures again instead of leaving them lay in a box in the storage unit. And I can share them with the kids.

Dale