ScanDigital scans your old photos so you don't have to

My wife's going to hate this post, but the hard truth is that she's got a packrat complex and won't throw anything away. That means that, in addition to mountains of old yearbooks, moldy keepsakes, and clothes that don't fit, we are also the proud owners of boxes and boxes of photographs snapped in the 25 years or so before the digital age allowed us to get by without the Foto Lab.

Thousands of photos in hardcopy format are not of much use aside from collecting dust (and they eventually decay into sludge), so I figured we'd kill two birds with one stone: Let's scan the photos and get rid of the old prints.

Now taking pictures is fun. Scanning them? Boring as hell, and often complicated when you have to correct for color problems (which is most of the time).

Enter ScanDigital. Very simply, ScanDigital does all that scanning work for you. You mail them your photos, they do the scan and cleanup, then they put your pics online for download or sharing (shots are not public unless you choose to make them so) and send you a CD or DVD with the scanned shots when you get back the originals.

The whole process takes two to three weeks from mailing out the pics to getting them back (I did this over the holidays, so it's hard to judge exactly), and ScanDigital emails you every step of the way with progress reports.

Overall I was very pleased with the service. Photos are rotated to the correct orientation, dust and scratches were generally fixed up, and the price -- 48 cents per print for 300dpi scanning -- isn't bad. You can pay more for 600dpi (68 cents each), and slides and negatives can be scanned at up to 4000dpi for not much more money, too. ScanDigital also does movie film, videotape, and even scrapbook pages.

Out of about a hundred pics I sent to the company, only one didn't turn out well: An old black-and-white 8x10 was awfully grainy when scanned. Had I seen the finished product before the shot was returned I would have opted for a higher dpi rating on that one, but there's no mechanism to arrange for that.

The shipping process can also be a little confusing: The "starter package" -- which gets you 100 photo scans for $89.95 -- is a pretty bad deal, but if you buy it ScanDigital sends you a prepaid mailer for shipping them the originals. To get the better prices as noted above you have to find and address your own envelope (and pay for the shipping), but ScanDigital's instructions on how and where to ship the photos can be a little confusing, and I felt like I was putting a lot of faith in whoever opened the mail to ensure the pics I sent were associated with my account. Ultimately, everything worked out fine, but I'd like to have the opportunity to request a prepaid mailer be sent out to me and simply billed to my account.

Overall, ScanDigital is a good value and offers good quality in the finished product, saving you countless hours of truly tedious work. And yes, there are numerous other services like this out there, many of which receive equally positive reports. If you've got loads of prints sitting around, you might consider using one of them to digitize them soon... just in case the pics turn into a "toxic soup."

Alas, in the end, ScanDigital did nothing to end the packratting: Rather than junk the old prints, now we have both the digital scans and the old prints, too.