Digitise your old photos, slides and videos

Memories can fade surprisingly quickly. Even as you read this magazine, millions of photographs, slides and tapes containing irreplaceable family events are slowly being destroyed. Light, heat, humidity, acids in papers, the plastic covering photos, adhesives and even pollutants in the air can conspire to rob us of objects with great sentimental value.

Fortunately, there’s still time to take action. As we’ll show in the pages that follow, anyone can rescue and revive photos, slides and home movies ­ even those shot on once-fashionable but now long-forgotten formats ­ and store them digitally, either on the hard disk of a personal computer or on a DVD. Make sure that those who come after you can enjoy the same memories of family and friends by taking the time to convert and then store them properly.

Protecting photos
For most of us, memories are made of old photos, slides and videos. Of these, photo prints are the easiest to deal with because they require no special equipment other than a scanner and some image editing software.

Flatbed scanners that can be used to digitise photos and other documents are surprisingly inexpensive. Models such as the Canon LiDE 25, which costs around £50, and Genius Colourpage Slim 1200, at around £70, are easy to set up and use. Click here for a complete guide to dozens of scanners, with reviews of each one.

Most scanners come with image editing software, but if yours doesn’t there’s no need to spend any more cash. Photofiltre, Gimp and Google’s Picasa are all free to download and use. Photofiltre and Gimp are both powerful image editing tools with all the features you could ever need, while Picasa includes a number of ‘quick-fix’ tools that can work wonders with deteriorating old photos.

A typical flatbed scanner is usually a little larger than a sheet of A4 paper, and connects to your computer via a USB cable. In fact, many get all the power they need from the same cable so there’s no need to mess about with power adapters.

Normally scanning is a three-step process. First the scanner performs a quick preview scan ­ if scanning a small photo print, the preview will show the photo and a large amount of white space around it. You can then select the area that you want, which in this case is the photo print, and then tell the scanner to carry on. It will perform a second, more detailed, scan of the photo and present the results.

It’s important to think about the resolution at which the scan should be performed. Higher resolutions will generally produce crisper results, but only up to a point, as eventually the limitations of both the scanner’s lenses and the photo itself will begin to show. In particular, scanning old and grainy photos at a high resolution will only serve to highlight these flaws.