Scan old printed photos into a PDF album

Shoeboxes of prints don't survive floods, moves or time. Scanning photos as a PDF album is the pragmatic preservation move — one file per envelope or event, shareable with the whole family in a single send.

Glossy prints without glare

• Work near a window, lights off — one soft source beats many hard ones on gloss.
• Tilt the print (not the phone) a few degrees until reflections slide off.
• Matte prints are easy; glossy 90s prints are the fussy ones — take two shots at slightly different tilts and keep the better.

Prints, album pages, or both

Loose prints: one photo per page, dark background, batch-scan a stack in ToPDF.
Album pages: photograph the whole page as one — it preserves the album's arrangement and handwritten captions, which are often the most precious content. For photos glued under plastic film, shoot at a slight angle to dodge the film's sheen and let perspective correction square things.

Enhancement and honesty

The document-style cleanup evens yellow casts and lifts faded contrast — old prints often look better scanned. It's still a faithful copy, not a restoration: tears and creases remain, which for family history is usually the right call.

Frequently asked questions

PDF or individual image files for photos?

PDF wins for albums and sharing-as-a-set; individual images win for editing single pictures. For preservation of a collection, the one-file-per-event PDF is hard to beat.

What resolution do I get?

Scans keep up to ~2400 px on the long side — comfortably enough to view full-screen and reprint at original size.