How to scan old photos

Before you start

• Handle prints by the edges, ideally with clean cotton gloves. Fingerprints on old silver prints are permanent.
• Dust everything. Wipe the scanner glass with a microfiber cloth and blow dust off prints with a rubber air blower. Never use water, cleaning sprays or tissues on a photo.
• Don't force photos out of "magnetic" albums. If a print is stuck, scan it in place, page and all, and crop afterwards.
• Sort before you scan. A pile per family branch or per decade saves hours of renaming later.

With a flatbed scanner

A flatbed scanner gives the best results, and a basic one is fine. These settings work for almost every print:

• Scan black-and-white photos in color mode (24-bit RGB, or 48-bit if offered). Old prints are often toned sepia or silver-gray, and color mode records that faithfully. Ungray only uses the brightness, so it doesn't matter for colorizing, but your archive keeps the original look.
• Turn off "auto-enhance", "dust removal" and "restore color" in the scanner software. They change the original in ways you can't undo. Do edits on a copy.
• Leave a small border around each print, and scan several prints at once if your software can split them automatically.
• Glossy or textured prints sometimes show a pattern. Rotating the print 90° on the glass usually reduces it.

With a phone

A phone is fine for a quick colorization or a first pass through a whole box. For your best photos, use a scanner.

• Use a scanning app that flattens and crops the photo and removes glare: Google PhotoScan (free) takes several shots and merges them to remove reflections.
• Use daylight from a window, not the flash, and not direct sun. Overcast light is perfect.
• Hold the phone parallel to the photo. Any tilt turns rectangles into trapezoids. A stack of books with the phone lying on top works as a stand.
• Fill the frame and tap to focus on a face. Don't zoom; move closer instead.

Slides and negatives

• Use a film scanner or a flatbed with a transparency lid (the lid has its own light). Scan 35 mm film at 2400–3200 dpi, larger formats at 1200–2400 dpi.
• Negatives must be inverted. Most scanner software does it for you when you choose "negative film". Black-and-white negatives scan best as "black-and-white negative".
• No film scanner? Photograph negatives with your phone on a light box or a tablet showing a white screen, then invert them in any photo editor.
• For hundreds of slides or reels of film, a scanning service is often worth it. Ask for TIFF files at the resolutions above.

Formats and file names

• Keep a TIFF master of every scan, untouched. Make JPEG copies (quality 90+) for sharing and colorizing. Ungray accepts both, and gives you back the same resolution you upload.
• Name files so they sort by date: 1952-06_wedding_grandma-anna_01.tif. If you only know the decade, use 1950s.
• Write down what you know while the family can still tell you: who, where, when. Most photo apps let you add a caption or "description" that stays with the file.
• Scan the back of prints that have handwriting, studio stamps or dates. It's part of the story.

Colorizing your scans

Drop a scan into Ungray. It colorizes the photo in a second or two, at the full resolution of your scan, and never redraws faces: every detail of light and shadow comes from your original. A few tips:

• Faded photos: leave them as they are. Ungray's model was trained on faded, grainy and soft inputs, and works best from the original scan.
• Wrong color on a dress or a car? Use Recolor: tap the area and pick the color you remember.
• Small prints: tick "Also enlarge 2× or 4×" to colorize and upscale in one step.
• Remember it's an estimate. Skies, skin and foliage come out reliably; clothes and painted objects are plausible guesses. If you know a color, recolor it, and label colorized copies as such when you share them.

Keeping them safe

• Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two different kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else (cloud storage, or a drive at a relative's house).
• Store the originals flat in acid-free boxes, away from attics, basements and sunlight.
• Share a folder with your family. Scans are only useful if people can find them.