How to digitise your photos: 4 ways to bring new life to old memories

Flicking through stacks of your old photos can be a joy – whether they're on your phone or in old photo albums. But the thought of organising them all can be tedious, to say the least.

Based on the sheer number of old photographs you might have, you couldn't be blamed for feeling a little daunted – and this is where we can help.

Keep scrolling as we take you through the best, and cheapest, way to keep your photos safe, which cloud services we recommend and how to access them from your phone. We also show you how you can scan actual physical snaps. Plus, how to make the most of your pics and share them with friends and family.

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How much does it cost to store pictures?

Most smartphone cameras’ photos are about 2MB. With that in mind, we've calculated the rough costs for storing 10,000 snaps through various platforms:

• £500 Printed photos (postcard-size 6 x 4in prints)
• £4.95 CDs (£8.99 for 50 blank 700MB discs)
• £2.03 Flash drive (£12.99 for a 128GB model)
• £1.67 DVDs (£6.29 for 16 blank 4.7GB discs)
• £1.20 SSD (£60 for a 1TB model)
• 60p External hard drive (£60 for a 2TB model)
• 7p a month Cloud storage (iCloud's monthly £6.99 2TB plan)

Cloud storage: which is best for you?

Realistically, cloud storage is the cheapest and most secure way to preserve your photos. 

We think Google Photos (if you have an Android phone) and Apple iCloud (if you have an iPhone) are the top choices for cloud storage, based on their prices and extra features. If you're an Amazon Prime customer, you get free, unlimited storage with Amazon Photo.

Our table, below, tells you what you can get for free and how much you can pay. Keep scrolling for more information on these three services and how to access them from your phone.

Amazon Photos 

Subscription cost: £1.49 a month (100GB), £7.99 a month (1TB), £15.99 a month (2TB)

Amazon Prime members get unlimited full-resolution photo storage. If this applies to you, it’s a free way to have copies of your favourite, high-resolution images in the cloud. Go to the Amazon Photos website, click Get Started and you’ll be prompted to log in.

If you scan the QR code with your phone camera, your phone will automatically direct you to the app store and the Amazon Photo app – follow the on-screen instructions to install it. Open up the app, then sign in with your Amazon login.

If you want to use Amazon Photos as your default backup, check Auto-save is selected and click Next. Otherwise, deselect Auto-save, then click Select uploads. Now, you need to give the app permission to access your photos so you can upload them – select Allow access. Choose the images you want to upload, then select Upload.

Apple iCloud

Subscription cost: 79p a month (50GB), £2.49 a month (200GB), £6.99 a month (2TB)

For Apple users, when it comes to storing photos, it doesn't get much better than iCloud. On an iPhone, go to Settings, select your name at the top, then iCloud. From here, you can set up and sign in to iCloud. If you select Photos you can sync your device to automatically back up. Select Optimise iPhone Storage to save smaller versions of files to your device to free up storage, and higher-res versions to iCloud.

Unfortunately, iCloud doesn’t work as seamlessly on Android, as you have to access it through your browser, so we suggest you choose an alternative service.

Google Photos

Subscription cost: £1.59 a month (100GB), £2.49 a month (200GB), £7.99 a month (2TB)

Download the Google Photos app, then open it and select Continue > Allow Access to All Photos. If you don’t want to receive notifications, on the next screen select Don’t Allow. Click Sign in > Continue. Enter your details and click Next. Select how to get the verification code, enter it and click Next. 

If you want to back up all your photos, select this. Otherwise, choose Do not back up.

Now you can choose whether to let Google automatically group by face – either Allow or Don’t allow. From the next screen, you can choose images to upload – if you select an individual image, choose the little cloud with an upward arrow icon to upload it. 

Ticks on the right-hand side allow you to select groups of images. A little scrollbar will then appear at the bottom of your screen that allows you to, for example, Back up.

At any point, manage your account by selecting your account top right (if you can’t see this option, start to scroll up and a bar will appear). Select Finish setup to access options including adding a partner account. To use Google Storage Saver, turn it on from here via Backup – then select Storage saver > Confirm.

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Sharing your pictures with friends and family

Once you've uploaded your images, you can start creating all kinds of new gifts or memories: virtual 'albums' let you group your pictures together and easily share a link with friends and family, or make a slideshow with a single click.

If you have a smart device with a display, such as the Google Nest or an Amazon Echo Show, you can set them up so photos you digitise to your cloud provider are shown in rotation on those screens, too. And if you have a Chromecast or Apple TV, you can beam your photos to the big screen.

Alternatively, you can create something physical: web services such as Moonpig and Touchnote allow you to create personalised cards and gifts with photos you upload, or you could even come full circle and print photobooks or photocopies to share with loved ones.

We've examined several online photobook services to see which are the easiest to use. Our guide on the best photo album books has more details.

Why should I digitise my old photos?

By digitising your photos, you're futureproofing precious memories. Physical copies can become discoloured, water damaged, or accidentally torn or stained by grubby hands, but the digital versions will remain pristine indefinitely. 

They're also much easier to share with friends and family. Perhaps most important of all, you can create backups in case the originals get lost or damaged.

There are other benefits in going digital. Thanks to the ever-improving machine-learning features of cloud services such as Google Photos and Apple iCloud, platforms can now give you an extra helping hand when it comes to tracking down a certain picture. 

Many of these platforms now feature face recognition, automatically grouping photos based on the names and faces you label.

Easy ways to digitise your old photos

1. Scan your photos at home

Flatbed scanners, like the ones included with most all-in-one printers, are ideal for digitising printed photos. They can typically scan in the ideal resolution for reprinting or digital screens, and any dust and glare is minimised thanks to the scanner's design.

Windows

Software like Autosplitter or Scanspeeder for Windows allow you to scan multiple pictures at once (as many as will fit on your scanner). The software can automatically crop the edges and straighten the images, so you can power through piles of albums in no time at all. 

While both of these programs have licence fees necessary for scanning in bulk, the free versions are fairly comprehensive and should cover all of your family photo needs. 

Mac

On a Mac, the in-built Photos app offers similar functionality, or you can download a third-party alternative such as Photo Scan by Photomyne from the Mac App Store.

After you scan your photos so you have digital copies, we suggest uploading them to a cloud storage service (scroll down for more information). This means you can access your snaps wherever you are in the world, have a digital copy in case the original photo goes missing and access and share your photos from all kinds of different devices.

If you want a printer that can print, copy and scan, see our expert guide on the best all-in-one printers for 2023. 

2. Buy a specialist photo scanner

If you think you'll have a lot of pictures to scan, it might be worth investing in a specialist photo scanning device.

Shop around and you'll see that most models cost £100-200 – it's a bit of an investment but will help ensure you digitise your images in the best possible quality. One example is the Doxie Go SE, pictured below. It's a nifty portable scanner that runs wirelessly and saves photos to an SD card. It costs around £180.

When scanning your images, it's helpful to keep all of your image files in one place – consider making a folder on your desktop so they're easy to find after a scanning session. Then, when you need to upload your pictures to cloud storage, you can select and upload them in one batch.

3. Use a photo scanning app on your smartphone

You might have heard about iPhone or Android apps that let you scan old photos using your phone camera. Unfortunately, no phone apps we looked at will really give you the same quality, colour balance and finish as a flatbed scanner – they simply can't, due to the nature of phone cameras – but they can be helpful in a pinch.

If you're looking around for a free mobile scanning app, consider the following:

• Microsoft Lens (available on iOS and Android) Hold your phone lens over a picture and this app will automatically capture, crop, straighten and upload it to Microsoft OneDrive, ready for access from your computer or another device.
• Google PhotoScan (available on iOS and Android) The app will ask you to take a picture of each corner of the image (to stop any glare from showing) and will then composite them together into a single image.

Scanning your own photos manually can be a time-consuming process, and the results can vary significantly depending on the quality of your phone camera, the stability when taking the picture and the lighting available. If future-proofing your archive of pictures is a concern, flatbed or professional scanning will always offer the best results.

You don't need to spend a lot on a smartphone to get a good camera – see our pick of the best mobile phones.

4. Send your snaps away

If you don't  have time to scan your images yourself, or don't want to, you can send your photos to a specialist photo scanning lab. You can find plenty of these companies online, such as Digitize Media and Vintage Photo Lab. Most scan your pictures in very high quality and return them to you along with your digitised files on a memory stick.

However, opting to send your snaps to a professional can prove very expensive. In fact, you can expect to spend anywhere between £80 and £150 to scan 500 photos. If you're on a budget, check in with smaller, local photo labs to see if they're able to offer a competitive service.

How to keep digital photos safe

• Photo albums These are easy to flick through with friends and family. You can't store anywhere near as many images as any other storage method, but this could force you to curate your photos and cast away the rubbish ones. Of course, the biggest drawback of photo albums is the danger of physical damage.
• Optical discs, hard drives and USB sticks All of these benefit from an ability to store full-resolution photos. These formats allow you to store images in whatever resolution you want.
• Writable DVDs and CDs A cheap option, but space is fairly limited. If you’re storing a lot of photos or videos, you’ll need a stack of them. They’re also quite fragile.
• Hard drives Great for backing up photos, as you get a lot of storage space for your money. However, as a hard drive contains moving parts, a big knock can cause mechanical failure and data corruption.
• Flash drives These have plummeted in price over the past few years, although they still cost a lot more than any hard drives per GB of storage. While there isn’t much risk of mechanical failure, there’s a very real threat of forgetting which drawer you’ve tucked them away in.

Want to take your photography to the next level? You need a proper camera – see how to buy a digital camera

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Additional reporting by Tom Morgan and Jonny Martin.