How to digitise a photo album without losing the backs

The back of an old photograph often holds the most valuable part: a date, a name, a place, a note from someone you never met. Scanning the fronts is the easy part. Keeping each back attached to its front, across hundreds of files, is where most digitising projects come unstuck.

1. Prepare one album at a time

Treat each album or shoebox as a separate batch with its own short code, such as A01. Batches keep mistakes small: if something goes wrong with the numbering, you only redo one album, not the whole collection. Note the batch code on a sticky note on the album itself.

Before you start, wipe the scanner glass with a soft, lint-free cloth. Dust on the glass appears on every scan. Handle prints by their edges with clean, dry hands. Fingerprints on old photographic surfaces can be permanent.

Photos in “magnetic” albums, with sticky pages under a plastic film, are often firmly stuck. Don’t force them. If a photo resists, scan it in place through the album page and accept a little glare, rather than risk tearing or bending it. Photos that come out easily can be scanned on both sides. Put them back in the same position before moving on.

2. Scanner settings

Resolution decides how far you can enlarge or crop a scan later. It is measured in dots per inch (dpi). For ordinary prints, these settings are a sensible balance between detail and file size:

Scanning above about 600 dpi rarely reveals more detail in a normal print, because the print itself does not contain it. You just get bigger files.

Scan black-and-white photographs in colour too. Many old prints have a warm or sepia tone, and a colour scan keeps it. You can still convert a copy to greyscale later. For the same reason, switch off automatic “restore colour”, sharpening and dust-removal options for your master scans. Apply those corrections to copies, so you can always return to the unaltered original.

Pencil writing on the back is often faint. If it is hard to read in the scan, try the next darker exposure or contrast setting for the backs only.

3. TIFF or JPEG?

JPEG compresses an image by discarding some detail. Each time a JPEG is edited and saved again, it loses a little more. TIFF (or PNG) stores the image without that loss, at the cost of larger files. An uncompressed 600 dpi colour TIFF of a 10 × 15 cm print is about 25 MB. A high-quality JPEG of the same scan is a few megabytes.

If storage allows, keep TIFF masters and make JPEG copies for sharing. Otherwise save JPEGs at the highest quality and never re-save the originals. Either way, the master scans are your archive: crop, rotate and retouch copies only.

4. A naming scheme that keeps pairs together

Good filenames make the collection usable without any special software. Three rules do most of the work:

• One number per photograph, not per file. The front and the back of a photograph share a number.
• The back gets a fixed marker just before the file extension, such as _b. Many scanning apps already do something similar; use whatever marker yours produces, as long as it is consistent. Epson FastFoto, for example, names the back _b and also saves an automatically enhanced copy of the front as _a. Treat that _a file as a version of the same photograph, not a new one.
• Pad numbers with zeros, such as 007 rather than 7, so that files sort correctly in every program. Otherwise 10 appears before 2.

For example, album 1 with four photographs, of which only the third has writing on the back:

Sorted by name, each back appears directly after its front, and a photograph without a back simply has one file. If you know dates, you can add them to a description or a spreadsheet later. Putting them in filenames is tempting, but many photographs have uncertain dates, and the numbering then becomes inconsistent.

5. Fixing the order afterwards

Scans rarely come out in the order you want. You may have worked from the back of the album, scanned two albums into one folder, or found out halfway that the scanner software counts every file, front or back, as a new number. Rescanning to fix the order wastes hours. Renaming is the better fix, with one catch.

Ordinary batch-renaming tools number every file in sequence. That gives a back its own number, so photograph 3 becomes number 3 and its back becomes number 4, and every photograph after it shifts out of step. When you reverse an album, the backs may even end up before their fronts.

The fix is to number by photograph rather than by file: find the pairs first, then assign one number to each pair. You can do this by hand for a small album. For larger batches, PairSort does exactly this in your browser: it recognises backs by their marker, keeps each one on its front’s number, can reverse the whole sequence, and downloads renamed copies plus a list of old and new names. Your original files stay as they are.

6. Recording what is written on the back

A scan of the back keeps the handwriting, but you can’t search it. Transcribing the text makes the collection far more useful. Ten minutes per album is often enough.

The simplest method is a spreadsheet with one row per photograph: the filename, a transcription of the back, a date or estimated decade, the people and the place. Write uncertain information as such, for example “probably Aunt Jo, about 1955”. Future readers can then tell facts from guesses.

If you prefer the information to travel with the image, most photo managers let you add a caption or description, stored in the file’s metadata. Check that your program writes it into the file itself, not only into its own database. Otherwise the caption may be lost when you move the files.

7. Backing up the result

A digitised collection exists to outlast the paper, so it needs a backup plan. A widely used rule is 3-2-1:

• Three copies of the files.
• On two different kinds of storage, for example your computer and an external drive.
• With one copy kept somewhere else, such as a cloud storage service or a drive at a relative’s house.

Every year or so, open a few files from each copy to confirm they still work. Keep the original albums too: a scan is a copy, not a replacement.

Checklist

1. One album per batch, each with its own code.
2. Clean glass; handle prints by the edges.
3. Fronts at 600 dpi in colour; backs at 300 dpi.
4. Automatic corrections off for master scans.
5. TIFF masters, or JPEG at the highest quality that is never re-saved.
6. One number per photograph; backs marked with _b; numbers padded with zeros.
7. Fix the order by renaming in pairs, not by rescanning.
8. Transcribe the backs into a spreadsheet or captions.
9. Three copies, two kinds of storage, one elsewhere.