Saving the Memories that can't be recreated; what to do with your shoe box of photos

Be careful with Britepix and ScanCafe. they ship your photos to Costa Rica and India, respectively, for processing.

I don't trust handling and processing of my irreplaceable photos in the third world. Do you?

I used ScanCafe - they were very upfront about shipping to India, its on their website - the service was outstanding (I actually spoke to real people) and, frankly, the price was unbeatable - you just can't math the quality and price combination. I figure that my taxes are being done in India and my x-rays are getting read in India, why not send my photos. it's not like these are the days of the pony express - they use only UPS and FedEx. Try them out - or pay quadruple.

There is quite a difference between sending reproducible information to india like the image of your xray or the financial data to do your taxes and sending your irreplacable photos. I seriously doubt they use FedEx or UPS to ship the photos to India. The shipping charges would be huge. They're probably using a frieght forwarder company that handles bulk shipments.

As if it isn't bad enough that they send your photos overseas, they are outsourcing American jobs, too. I'm not a fan of companies oursourcing our jobs overseas or of the service i've received from the companies that have done it. If people keep buying from companies that do this, how long before the last american job heads to India? My job could be next and so could yours.

It sounds like the negative comments were from a competitor. Frankly, I used Scancafe for my work and my family. Scancafe has much higher quality, and the price is much lower than the other guys.

Sorry for the guy who is complaining, but Scancafe runs a first class operation. I even talked to them on the phone. I believe they use Fedex Air Overnight to make sure everything is safe. It certainly was more me!

BTW - Thanks Wesley for writing up this article!

Thanks for the interesting article but i'm a little surprised you'd list a company that will send people's photos to India. Seems like quite a liability to me. I can't imagine if I'd lost all or some of my family's photos. but getting all that history digitized is a great idea.

First they claim that Pros choose scancafe. What a farce! What true pro will let a company send their one of a kind art work to India? None that I know.
Then they say they are the most trusted source. Huh? They've been around for all of 3 or 4 months and they sound increasingly desparate for business.
Now they’re claiming that the “Wall Street Journal listed ScanCafe as most affordable service for best quality”. That’s as big a lie as they come. Here is the article they are referring to. The article never talks scancafe, much less the quality of their product, and only lists their name along with that of several other companies.
Here is the link to the article on WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117020659033393092-search.html?KEYWORDS=kodak&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month

What other lies are they telling. Keep a close eye on these guys. You can't trust anyone on the internet.

My father was a semi-professional photographer (i.e., people paid him, but he never made a profit -- fortunately it was only a hobby for him). When he died, he left behind hundreds and hundreds of boxes of slides. My sister and I were faced with the daunting task of feeding them one-by-one into a scanner, letting them rot, or paying a prohibitive amount to have someone else do it. I found Scancafe on the web and decided to send them one box of about 1200 slides.

It took quite a while for them to get to the order, but I was genuinely surprised by the quality of the results. The slides had been sitting in a damp environment for years -- in some cases, decades -- so the quality of the media was mixed at best. The scans were extraordinarily clear, and most of the dust and misting on the slides had been filtered out. The total cost was significantly less than $200.

Anyone who worries about using Indian outsourcing must still have a distorted view of the process. The shipping step is only slightly more involved (and therefore at risk) than shipping to say, North Dakota. Once it has arrived in India, most outsourcing is handled by college graduates or at least by well-educated and highly trained individuals. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but I don't think it helps anyone in the United States by insisting on using Americans to perform menial tasks that someone in another country is enthusiastic about doing. Using a U.S. worker in that circumstance is simply taxing the customer to enable the U.S. worker avoid doing work at a higher skill level.

I plan on sending a few thousand more slides and negatives to Scancafe over the next week.

all three positive responses here were posted by scancafe employees or owners. a lot of the text came right off various parts of their website. this stuff is pure propaganda.likewise, some of the other comments are probably from competitors. i doubt there is much on this page that can be belieived.

We received this email from Michael Droz Founder/CEO of Munio Memory Services, LLC, and I am posting it here as an update...

I thought you should know about my company, Munio Memory Services (www.muniomemoryservices.com). We provide memory insurance for family memories (photos, children's art, important documents and personal journals. Our insurance policy costs $24.99 per month and covers up to 4,500 photos, 3,000 documents / children's art, 600 slides, 300 negatives and 6 personal journals. For an additional fee you can have as many memories as you want protected. Our insurance policy includes the digitization of all these memories and digital copies for the customer to enjoy. Our service is roughly 5x more affordable than any scanning ervice out there.

Wesley Hein
Wesley [at] lifetwo [dot] com

Wes, this sounds great on the surface, but did you check into it?
It's a Mulilevel marketing gimick. $25/mo and you can send a max of 50 negatives a month. could take years and years of $25/mo to get your entire colection done. Doesn't sound like such a bargain after all.

I don't care who is posting--after reading this I bought a Coolscan and am doing the scans myself. A lot of skill is required; you give the film a shot of Dust-Off, turn on Digital ICE and press enter. You'd think these guys were doing drum scans or using a Scitex.

Great topic.... I've used Scanmyphotos.com to secure all our analog pictures. Charged just $49.95 for one-thousand photos mailed to them in So. Calif. and mmailed back the same day. Here's a news item on them from earlier today....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20070821/bs_prweb/prweb548018_7

Great article. The WSJ article is good as well.

My question - why are all of these post anonymous? DigmyPics appears to have issues with offshoring product (e.g. they can't compete on price so they pull the Americanism lever, never mind quality and service), while Britepix and ScanCafe seem to feel the need to provide a wholesome North American image whether accurate or not (so price and quality isn't enough?).

I'm a consumer - so I have things like photos to Disney or that soccer match in D.C..

I bought a Nikon 5000 and tried doing this myself. It is not easy - or I'm too picky. The capture is the easy part, is almost entirely automatic and ICE and GEM work wonders. I stored in TIFF format. Then I found I was spending hours and hours cropping, color correcting and touching up in Photoshop. This is all very stepwise and formulaic, tedious but necessary. I was spending all of my free time editing photos!!

With over 10,000 negatives and 3,000 slides it was going to take years, so I gave up and sold the Nikon on Ebay. I'm going to use a service.

The simple math is just too obvious, I will SAVE over $2,500 in my first order. Since the technology (Nikon) takes care of the scanning what I want all I am paying for is the clean-up workflow, and that's exactly what Indian offshore facilities do best - repetitive task based upon clearly defined parameters.

If many of these companies based out of So Cal were serious about price competition they would move their facilities from California to someplace like Indiana or South Dakota where property and office space is much cheaper, and the workforce costs less in overhead. DigMyPics has the right idea, Mesa AZ.

I'll be sending my first 1000 pics to ScanCafe this week. I may come back here crying like a little school girl or I may be happy. Whatever the outcome it will be based upon the quality of the product and not hysteria.

Hoping for the best.
Rick Watts

Rick,

With all the extra work involved, it does sound like a pro would be the way to go. But, if the objective is purely archival (i.e., capturing with no post-processing necessary), it sounds like owning a scanner is a much more sensible (and safer) way to go.

There's no way I could ever consider shipping my irreplaceable slides anywhere--California, India, whatever.

Michael
Columbus, OH

Rick: What was your experience with Scancafe? Service and quality-wise?

Here is a side by side comparison of the scanning services with their prices etc

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phRG-JoD0f6N8DrY8b8ZGLw

Of course they don't use UPS or FexEx to ship to India. I called them and spoke to a very nice woman to get some information. They use a freight forwarding company to ship all your valuables to India. Freight forwarders ship in massive containers which are not treated delicately; avoiding humidity, heat... Be aware of what you are getting yourself into.

You really think they use FedEx Overnight Air for every customer...? There is no way they could ever turn a profit if they sent ever customer's images FedEx at all let alone FedEx Overnight Air. They only do that when they have screwed up or want to make sure they please a high profile customer. Just use some common sense or call and ask them. They will tell you the truth. They use the lowest bid freight forwarder.