Do you have a lot of old photos around your home that you want to digitize? If so, you've likely looked into photo scanning services online that will take care of all the manual scanning for you. Here are some tips to follow before you put your photos in the mail.
Count Your Photos
You'll want to take a quick inventory of your photos so that you know how many you have. This will allow you to verify if all of them were scanned when the digital photos come back to you and that you receive all of your originals back when they are returned to you. Make sure to write down the number of photos somewhere safe so that you can reference it later when necessary.
Organize Your Photos
If your photo scanning service allows you to have files labeled appropriately, then you'll likely want to do some organization to keep things in order. This is especially true if you are removing photos from albums that have some sort of progression to them that may get lost when they are sent for scanning.
You can take photos and place them in plastic bags to keep them together, and then write on the plastic bag what that group of photos is called. You may want to do a basic organization that just keeps photos organized by the year that they are taken or get even more specific with the event that the photos are from. For example, if you want a group of photos of a friend or family member's wedding labeled accordingly, you'll want to put all of these photos together.
Pack The Box Well
Another thing you'll want to do is get a box to pack the photos in rather than an envelope. The box is going to ensure that the photos do not get bent accidentally in the mail and is going to protect your photos a lot better during transit. In terms of packing the box, you do not know how your photos are going to move around in the box when they are in transit. That is why it is worth packing the box tightly to ensure that the photos don't move around. Use bubble wrap, packing peanuts, recycled paper, and anything else you can find to fill in the gaps and make it hard for the contents to move around.
Reach out to an online photo scanning service for more info on how to pack up your photos.
