How Do I Digitize Thousands of Photos?

Throughout the 20th century, film cameras were a staple of family outings and major events. Vacationers would pack film to preserve their memories and relatives would bring their own cameras to weddings alongside the professional photographers. One-hour photo development stands popped up on every corner and families filled countless albums with their prints. 

However, modern technology changed all of this. Film is no longer used and fewer people even buy digital cameras. With just a click of your smartphone, you can take high-quality photos and share them across the web. But how can you share the piles of photo albums and countless prints that you curated and stored over the years? 

You aren’t the only one trying to figure out what to do with thousands of old photos or how to digitize them. There might be prints from hundreds of events and decades of memories that you want to preserve and share with your loved ones. You have options. We are here to help.

Start by Sorting Through Your Photos

Before you can create a plan to digitize thousands of photos, it helps to get an idea of the scope of the project. Spend some time collecting your photos and organizing them to get an idea of what needs to be done. Here are a few steps to do this:

1. Pull photo prints from across your house. Check your attic, storage closets, bedrooms, and other hidden areas where you might have placed photo prints. 
2. Sort through your prints to organize them in a sensible way. You might place them in groups by year or by different events. Choose an organization method that works for you.  
3. Identify which photo memories you want to keep. If the cameraman’s thumb mostly obscures a photo, it might not be worth your time to scan it. 
4. Count how many photos you need to scan. You don’t need an exact number, but you should have an idea of how many prints you need to digitize. 

It’s understandable if you get overwhelmed in this part of the project. Our customers are often surprised by the sheer number of prints they have and aren’t sure how to digitize thousands of photos to protect their memories.

Self-Digitize With Smartphone Apps

Your first option is to digitize your memories is to use smartphone apps that are specifically designed to help you scan photos. Customers often ask us about these apps to see if they are worth using. At Memory Fortress, we have mixed emotions about them. Photo digitizing apps are useful if you have a handful of prints you want to scan quickly. Many have editing features that allow you to share them on social media. However, they aren’t the best option if you need to digitize thousands of photos. 

Many photo-digitizing smartphone apps can only handle one photo at a time. If you have two thousand photos to digitize and it takes a minute to digitize each picture, then it would take more than 16 hours to work through all of your memories. This doesn’t include breaks, extra time to edit the photos, and time spent sorting through prints to organize them. It could take weeks to digitize thousands of photos if you can only handle scanning a few stacks of photos at a time.

Hire a Professional Photo Scanning Service    

If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of photos you have, send them to professionals who can take care of the scanning for you. At Memory Fortress, we digitize thousands of photos each day. Our team members turn print memories into digital files, scan 12×12 scrapbook pages, and also digitize videotapes and film. We are experts in quickly digitizing photos while maintaining their quality.

This process is considerably easier than scanning photos yourself. Once you have organized and counted all of your photos, start your order and tell us how many photos should expect. Once your order is placed, carefully pack up your memories and ship them to our Atlanta-based office. When your prints arrive, we will start the scanning process to digitize thousands of photos and deliver your images over the cloud, on a USB drive, or in any format you prefer. 

Here is the added benefit of working with our team: we can keep your photos in the groups you carefully curated. While we can’t label individual photos, we can take the labels you create for different categories and apply them to your files. If you placed all of your photos from a California vacation in a labeled plastic bag, we will make sure that the label is applied to the set. This way your photos arrive both digitized and organized. 

Once we are done with your photos, we will pay to ship the original prints back to you. You can hold on to these analog memories while enjoying your digital files.

How Much Does it Cost to Digitize Thousands of Photos?

Some customers worry that this project will be expensive because they need to digitize thousands of photos. However, the opposite is true. We offer a sliding scale to customers, which means the more prints you need to digitize, the more you can save. 

You can estimate how much your photo scanning project will cost by looking at our pricing page. We charge on a per-photo model, which can easily help you calculate your costs. You don’t need to know the exact number of photos you have when sending them to us, but a ballpark number can help you set a budget.

If you want the most basic scanning quality and have boxes of loose photos, you can expect to pay $0.25 per photo. This applies to the first 1,500 photos. Then the price drops to $0.23 per photo up to 3,000 photos. The price keeps dropping every few thousand photos until you reach 10,000 when you only need to pay $0.17 per photo.  

We love it when customers need to digitize thousands of photos because it allows us to make the project more affordable for them so they can protect their memories.

Start Your Order With Memory Fortress Today

If you’re wondering what to do with your thousands of old photos, take the first steps today, and contact us to protect your print photos and digitize your memories forever. Let our team at Memory Fortress know that we will need to digitize thousands of photos from your family history. We will do our best to scan your photos within five business days of receiving them and send the prints back to you in a timely manner.  

Start your order today and take the first steps to create digital memories.

We digitize everything right here at our facility in metro Atlanta, processed by US citizens.