How to scan old photos properly

Ten extra minutes of care here beats an hour of fixing later. Here's what actually matters: resolution, light, and the file format you archive in.

Step 0: clean first

Before anything touches the scanner: dust off the print with a soft dry cloth, a lens blower or a clean make-up brush, and wipe the scanner glass. A speck of dust on the glass shows up as a bright white dot on every scan you make that day, and dust baked into a scan is one of the hardest things to remove afterwards. Never use water or cleaning fluid on the print itself: old photographic paper is easily damaged. Which brush, which cloth, and what to do about mould or stuck-together prints is a subject of its own: how to clean old photos before scanning.

Which DPI? 300, 600 or 1200

DPI (dots per inch) decides how much detail the scanner reads from the paper. More is not automatically better: past a certain point you're just magnifying paper grain and making enormous files. A practical rule of thumb:

A concrete example: a 10×15 cm print at 600 DPI gives roughly 2400×3600 pixels, plenty to re-print at the same size, crop generously, or run through a photo upscaler for a large-format print. The same photo at 300 DPI gives 1200×1800 pixels, which looks fine on a phone but runs out of detail the moment you crop in on a face.

Whatever the device, the resolution question has one answer: match the DPI to the print size using the table above, not a single "best" number. If you want to know how to scan old photos for the best resolution, pick 600 DPI for a standard print and 1200 DPI for something small you will crop into; the result is a high resolution file you can enlarge or restore later.

Digitizing photos properly means picking the DPI before anything else, since a low-resolution scan can never be fixed later. How to digitize photos well comes down to three things: the DPI table, good light, and saving the master as TIFF or PNG rather than JPG. Pictures scanned to digital at 600 DPI hold enough detail for a 2× enlargement or a proper restoration pass; 300 DPI mostly doesn't. For most people the best way to scan old photos is a flatbed at 600 DPI, or the phone routine below if a flatbed isn't handy, and the best way to scan photos that are small to begin with is 1200 DPI. How to scan a photograph without a white hotspot in the middle comes down to one rule, covered below: kill the flash and use indirect daylight.

One more tip: scan in colour mode even for black & white photos. A "black and white" print is rarely neutral: it's often warm-toned or yellowed, and a colour scan preserves that information, which makes later correction and colourising work better.

Already got a scan sitting on your computer? You don't have to wait until the end of this guide: restore the scan for free now, then come back for the archiving tips below.

No scanner? Your phone is better than you think

A modern phone camera can genuinely rival a mid-range flatbed, if you control the light. Most bad phone-scans fail for the same three reasons: glare, shadow, and perspective distortion. Here's the routine that avoids all three. How to scan with android or with an iPhone comes down to the same steps either way. Open the camera app (or Google PhotoScan, which runs on both), follow the routine below, and export the file once it's captured:

1. Use indirect daylight. Put the photo on a flat surface near a window, not in direct sun. Overhead room lights are the main source of glare; turn them off if you can.
2. Kill the flash. A flash fired straight at glossy photo paper guarantees a white hotspot in the middle of the picture.
3. Hold the phone parallel to the photo. Tilting causes keystone distortion (the photo becomes a trapezoid) and uneven focus. Hover directly above, square-on.
4. Watch for your own shadow and reflections. With glossy prints, you and your phone can literally reflect in the surface. Angle the photo slightly away from the light source until the reflection disappears from the screen preview.
5. Fill the frame, then tap to focus on the photo before shooting. Take two or three shots: focus misses are invisible on a phone screen and painful later.
6. If the photo is curled, flatten it under glass from a picture frame (clean it first). That alone fixes most focus and shadow problems.

Dedicated scanning apps (Google PhotoScan, Microsoft Lens and similar) combine several angled shots to remove glare automatically, and they work well for glossy prints. For matte prints, a single careful photo in good light is usually just as good.

The routine works the same on an iPhone, an Android phone or a tablet, since it is about light and angle, not the brand; a tablet just gives you a bigger screen to check focus on. Google PhotoScan can save straight into your Google Photos library, combining several angled shots the way the list above describes by hand.

TIFF/PNG vs JPG: why it matters for archiving

This is the step most people get wrong, and it's invisible until it's too late. JPG is a lossy format: every time a JPG is saved, the image is re-compressed and fine detail is thrown away permanently. Save a scan as JPG, open it, straighten it, save again, adjust the contrast, save again, and each save quietly degrades it. The damage shows up as blocky artefacts around edges, exactly where old photos hold their most fragile detail.

TIFF and PNG are lossless: the file can be opened, edited and re-saved a thousand times and remain pixel-identical. The practical workflow:

• Master scan → TIFF or PNG. This is your digital negative. Store it and don't touch it. (TIFF is the archival standard; PNG is equally lossless and more universally viewable; either is fine.)
• Copies for sharing → JPG at high quality. Fine for e-mail and family group chats, because nobody re-edits those.
• Never re-edit the JPG. If you want to change something, go back to the master and export a fresh copy.

Yes, TIFF files are big: a 600 DPI scan of a 10×15 print runs 25-75 MB. Storage is cheap; your only surviving photo of a great-grandparent is not. Storing old photos digitally only pays off if the master file is lossless: a JPG re-saved a dozen times slowly degrades, a TIFF or PNG never does.

Getting the scans onto your computer, organized

Once the files exist, organising them is mostly a folder-naming question: year, event and surname get you further than any special software. Keep that folder structure next to the TIFF-master-plus-JPG-copies workflow above, ideally on two separate drives.

Getting a file onto the computer is one export step. To scan photos to computer from a flatbed, pick a destination folder in the scanner driver's save dialog before the scan starts; from a phone, AirDrop or e-mail the shot to yourself, sync it through a cloud photo library, or plug in a cable. How to scan photos to computer for a whole shoebox is that same step repeated, and to scan old photos to digital that lasts, save a TIFF or PNG master before any copy goes out as a JPEG.

Scanning a shoebox: bulk, batches and no shop required

For a whole shoebox, use a flatbed's document feeder if it has one, or repeat the phone routine print by print; a phone needs no warm-up between shots. To share scans with the family, export once at full resolution and let everyone work from JPG copies of that single master. That is also how to copy photos without a darkroom: scan the print, save a lossless master, then print or share from that file.

Reprints for relatives start with a high-DPI scan, since a reprint made from a low-quality file looks worse than the original. Prints that are curled or bent should be flattened under clean glass from an old picture frame first, as in the phone steps above. Physical photos fade and yellow a little more every year they sit in a box, which is the real argument to digitize old photos now, while the photos still hold their detail.

Splitting the shoebox by decade first makes it easier to turn it into a group project, because it groups the print sizes that share a DPI setting.

None of this needs to cost money: a flatbed or phone you already own does the job at home, with no shop visit and no shipping a box of prints. Paid digitising services exist, but this guide can't tell you what a local shop charges. Doing it quickly mostly means not chasing perfection on prints that only need a quick digital copy.

After scanning: enlarging and enhancing

Enlarging and enhancing happen after scanning, not during it: scan at 600 or 1200 DPI, then run the file through the upscaler for extra size, or let restoration handle the enhancing.

DPI, black-and-white and a few device-specific questions

For black-and-white prints, use the colour-mode trick described earlier: scan in colour even though the print has no colour, since a warm or yellowed tone still carries information worth keeping.

A JPEG is fine for sharing copies, but keep a TIFF or PNG master aside. In the end, how to scan old photos to digital just means getting a good file in place of a print, and the routine above does that.

Paid scanning apps and mail-in services exist and charge per photo. Google PhotoScan, mentioned above, does the phone-capture step for nothing, and a flatbed or phone you already own does the whole job without installing anything.

Negatives need a light source behind the film rather than reflected light, which a flatbed with a backlight attachment does better than a phone. To scan photos and negatives in the same session, treat them as two jobs; scanning photos and negatives both end in TIFF or PNG masters in the same archiving workflow.

A few more edge cases

Inverting is different from flipping: the flip tool mirrors a shot or turns it upside down, but it doesn't invert tone into a photographic negative, and this site has no colour-invert control, so how to invert photos into a negative is a job for an image editor. If you only need part of a photo, how to cut a photo is a crop question: the crop tool lets you drag a box over the part worth keeping.

The same routine covers postcards, certificates and children's drawings: DPI table first, then light, then a lossless master file.

Bringing back detail a print lost to fading is restoration rather than scanning: scan it with the steps above, then run the result through the free restore tool. Photos deleted from a phone or a dead drive are a data-recovery question, which this page can't help with.

From a finished scan to a shared file

Once a print exists as a file, you can scan photo online the rest of the way by uploading it to PicReviver's restore step: free for ten runs a day of up to five files each. It accepts TIFF, PNG, JPG, HEIC or WEBP directly, so whatever the scanner or phone exported works without converting it first.

For a paper document such as a letter or a form, the phone routine still works, but ScanReviver's scan to PDF is built for that job, with edge detection tuned for paper rather than glossy prints.

Lift the photo off the glass as soon as a pass finishes, so the next one does not pick up the dust. Working out how to scan photos to digital files starts with resolution: a flatbed at 600 dpi is the floor for a 10x15 print, while how to scan pictures to digital copies of whole album pages is the same job at a larger size, where 300 dpi is enough. To scan physical photos to digital archives worth keeping, save a TIFF master and export JPGs from it; going straight from physical photos to digital JPGs throws away headroom you cannot get back.

Scan came out sideways, mirrored or too small?

A phone scan sometimes comes out on its side: how to rotate a photo from there is one press on the rotate tool (90° left, 90° right or 180°). If it reads backwards, because a case or a flatbed lid mirrored the shot, how to flip a photo and how to mirror photos have the same answer: the flip tool's left-right button, which is also how to reverse photos here. How to invert photo tones into a negative is a different question this site doesn't cover. If the scan came out too small, how to enlarge a photo is the upscale tool; if the file is too large to email, how to reduce photos is either resize or compress.

After the scan: restoration

Even a perfect scan of a faded print is still a scan of a faded print. This is where restoration comes in: upload the scan to PicReviver and the tool rebuilds sharpness and lost detail (free), and the file is deleted right after processing. It accepts TIFF and PNG directly (also JPG, HEIC and WEBP), so you can feed it your archival master at full quality. Blurry faces respond especially well to the dedicated face restore mode. And if you're wondering why the print faded in the first place, we wrote that up too: why old photos fade.

By Sam Ridder, I build and run PicReviver on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.