Sound Advice: When scanning valuable old photos, save them on multiple formats

Q: I am finally ready to scan and save our family photo collection. Most of the pictures are in print form, although some are negatives. I have multiple questions: Are you still recommending the Epson flatbed scanner? What about saving the scans to the cloud? Is there any particular cloud service you recommend? Do you have any other tips regarding photo scanning and saving?

A: I'm OK with using the cloud as an additional backup measure but not as the prime storage source. Cloud and photo services come and go as well as change, and your precious photographs and family history are far too important to trust to the whims of these companies.

To save the photos electronically, you will need a scanner, your computer, an external hard drive (I recommend at least 1 TB) and several large flash drives (64 GB or larger).

I recommend the $199 Epson Perfection V550 scanner (epson.com) for its scan quality, the ability to scan prints, slides and negatives, and because you can place multiple pictures on the glass and it will scan and save them as independent images. That is a tremendous time saver.

Put the pictures on the scanner glass and make a preview scan. Look at the preview window and rotate the pictures so they all are upright. I recommend scanning at 600 dpi or higher to preserve as much of the original image quality as possible. When you do the final scan, the individual images will be saved into a folder of your choosing. You can organize the pictures as you choose, for example, by special event, family members or time period.

I recommend that you then copy the pictures to both an external hard drive and external flash drives. Keep those in separate places for security. For cloud backup, I save all of my images to a Google Drive account. Just log in and drop and drag your folders there. I suggest starting with a Google One 100 GB account for only $1.99 per month. You can expand the amount of storage you need as your needs grow.

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