How to digitise your photos: 4 ways to bring new life to old memories

Flicking through stacks of your old photos can be a joy, whether they're on your phone or in old photo albums. But the thought of organising them all can be tedious, to say the least.

Given how many old photographs you might have, you couldn’t be blamed for feeling a little daunted – but that's where our experts can help.

Below, we explore the best (and most affordable) ways to keep your photos safe, which cloud services we recommend, and how to access them from your phone. Plus, we explain how to scan physical photos and share them with friends and family.

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How much does it cost to store pictures?

On most modern smartphones, each photo typically takes up at least 2MB of storage.

With that in mind, we've calculated the approximate costs for storing 10,000 snaps through various platforms:

• Around £1,000 for printed photos (6x4-inch gloss prints at 12p each)
• Around £6.90 for CDs (based on a spend of £11.85 for a pack of 50 blank 700MB discs)
• Around £3.35 for DVDs (based on a spend of £6.69 for a pack of 10 blank 4.7GB discs)
• Around £1.90 in SSD space (based on a spend of £11.99 for a 128GB SSD)
• Around £1.30 in USB stick storage space (based on a spend of £8.50 for a 128GB USB stick)
• Around 30p a month in cloud storage (based on iCloud’s £2.99 per month 200GB plan)

Cloud storage: which is best for you?

Cloud storage remains one of the easiest and most secure ways to back up your photos.

If you have an Android device, Google Photos is a sensible option for keeping your pictures safe and accessible. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime customers get free, unlimited storage with Amazon Photos.

Apple iPhone users have iCloud, which offers 5GB of free storage and paid upgrades for extra space. However, note that Which? believes that Apple has breached UK competition law. (Read more: Which? files £3bn legal claim against Apple for competition law breach).

Our table below tells you what you can get for free and how much you can pay.

Amazon Photos 

• 5GB free storage (unlimited free storage for Prime members)
• £1.49 a month (100GB), £7.99 a month (1TB), £15.99 a month (2TB)

Amazon Prime members get unlimited full-resolution photo storage. If this applies to you, it’s a free way to have copies of your favourite, high-resolution images in the cloud.

Go to the Amazon Photos website, click Get Started and you’ll be prompted to log in.

If you scan the QR code with your phone camera, your phone will automatically direct you to the app store and the Amazon Photo app – follow the on-screen instructions to install it. Open up the app, then sign in with your Amazon login.

Assuming you want to use Amazon Photos as your default backup, check Auto-save is selected and click Next. Otherwise, deselect Auto-save, then click Select uploads. Now, you need to give the app permission to access your photos so you can upload them – select Allow access. Choose the images you want to upload, then select Upload.

Apple iCloud

• 5GB free storage
• 99p a month (50GB), £2.99 a month (200GB), £8.99 a month (2TB), £26.99 a month (6TB), £54.99 a month (12TB)

When it comes to storing photos, iCloud is a natural fit for Apple users.

On an iPhone, go to Settings, select your name at the top, then iCloud. From here, you can set up and sign in to iCloud. If you select Photos, you can sync your device to automatically back up. Select Optimise iPhone Storage to save smaller versions of files to your device to free up storage, and higher-res versions to iCloud.

Unfortunately, iCloud doesn’t work as seamlessly on Android, as you have to access it through your browser. So we suggest you choose an alternative service.

Google Photos

• 15GB free storage (shared across Drive, Gmail & Photos through Google One)
• £1.59 a month (100GB), £7.99 a month (2TB), £18.99 a month (2TB)

Download the Google Photos app. Open it and select Continue > Allow Access to All Photos. If you don’t want to receive notifications, on the next screen select Don’t Allow. Click Sign in > Continue. Enter your details and click Next. Select how to get the verification code, enter it and click Next.

If you want to back up all your photos, select this. Otherwise, choose Do not back up.

Now you can choose whether to let Google automatically group by face – either Allow or Don’t allow. From the next screen, you can choose images to upload – if you select an individual image, choose the little cloud with an upward arrow icon to upload it.

Ticks on the right-hand side allow you to select groups of images. A little scrollbar will then appear at the bottom of your screen that allows you to, for example, Back up.

At any point, manage your account by selecting your account top right (if you can’t see this option, start to scroll up and a bar will appear). Select Finish setup to access options including adding a partner account. To use Google Storage Saver, turn it on from here via Backup – then select Storage saver > Confirm.

Microsoft OneDrive

• 5GB free storage
• £1.99 a month (100GB), £5.99 a month (1TB), £7.99 a month (6TB)

The camera roll on your device only backs up to Microsoft OneDrive – it does not sync photos both ways. That means you can delete backed-up photos and videos from your device, and the copies in OneDrive won't be affected.

To automatically back up your camera roll to OneDrive, open the OneDrive app on your desktop, and tap the account image at the top. Then, tap Turn on below the 'Camera backup is off' text. Tap Confirm.

Microsoft recommends selecting Backup only when charging in Settings to help preserve your battery when downloading. 

You can also include additional photos in your OneDrive camera roll, such as photos received through social media or third-party editing apps.

After pressing the account image, tap Settings and then Camera backup. Then select Back up device folders. 

Flip the categorise toggle on if you want to keep the original folders, and flip it off if you want all images to go into your Camera Roll folder. Then scroll through the list and choose which folders you want to be backed up.

If you're still using a Windows 10 PC, you need to take action. Find out more: Windows 10 is ending security support.

Need a new phone? Let us help – see our expert pick of the best mobile phones.

Sharing your pictures with friends and family

Once you've uploaded your images, you can start creating all kinds of new gifts or memories: virtual 'albums' let you group your pictures together and easily share a link with friends and family, or make a slideshow with a single click.

If you have a smart device with a display, such as the Google Nest or an Amazon Echo Show, you can set them up so photos you digitise to your cloud provider are shown in rotation on those screens, too. And if you have a Chromecast or Apple TV, you can beam your photos to the big screen.

You can also print your photos at home if you have a suitable printer (see our guide to the best photo printers), but be careful when buying a new model – some printers can be costly to run and may use up ink quickly.

For example, while the Canon Pixma TS3750i costs around £49, we estimate a typical user would spend about £113 per year on ink – more than twice the price of the printer itself. By contrast, a refillable tank printer such as the HP Smart Tank 7305 (£220) costs roughly £2 a year to run, showing why tank models are far more economical in the long term.

Alternatively, you can create something physical: web services such as Rosemood and CEWE allow you to print photobooks or photocopies to share with loved ones.

We've looked at several online photobook services to see which are the easiest to use. Our guide on the best photo album books has more details.

Why should I digitise my old photos?

By digitising your photos, you're futureproofing precious memories. Physical copies can become discoloured, water damaged, or accidentally torn or stained by grubby hands. But the digital versions will remain pristine indefinitely. 

They're also much easier to share with friends and family. Perhaps, most important of all, you can create backups in case the originals get lost or damaged.

There are other benefits in going digital. Thanks to the ever-improving machine-learning features of cloud services such as Google Photos and Apple iCloud, platforms can now give you an extra helping hand when it comes to tracking down a certain picture. 

Many of these platforms now feature face recognition, automatically grouping photos based on the names and faces you label.

Easy ways to digitise your old photos

1. Scan your photos at home

Flatbed scanners, like the ones included with most all-in-one printers, are ideal for digitising printed photos. They can typically scan in the ideal resolution for reprinting or digital screens, and any dust and glare is minimised thanks to the scanner's design.

Windows

Software like Autosplitter or Scanspeeder for Windows allow you to scan multiple pictures at once (as many as will fit on your scanner). The software can automatically crop the edges and straighten the images, so you can power through piles of albums in no time at all. 

While both of these programs have licence fees necessary for scanning in bulk, the free versions are fairly comprehensive and should cover all of your family photo needs. 

Mac

On a Mac, the in-built Photos app offers similar functionality, or you can download a third-party alternative such as Photo Scan by Photomyne from the Mac App Store.

After you scan your photos so you have digital copies, we suggest uploading them to a cloud storage service (scroll down for more information). This means you can access your snaps wherever you are in the world, have a digital copy in case the original photo goes missing and access and share your photos from all kinds of different devices.

If you want a printer that can print, copy and scan, see our expert guide on the best all-in-one printers.

2. Buy a specialist photo scanner

If you think you'll have a lot of pictures to scan, it might be worth investing in a specialist photo scanning device.

Shop around and you'll see that most models cost £100-200 – it's a bit of an investment but will help ensure you digitise your images in the best possible quality.

One example is the Doxie Go SE, pictured below, which runs wirelessly and saves photos to an SD card.

When scanning your images, it's helpful to keep all of your image files in one place – consider making a folder on your desktop so they're easy to find after a scanning session. Then, when you need to upload your pictures to cloud storage, you can select and upload them in one batch.

3. Use a photo scanning app on your phone

You might have heard about iPhone or Android apps that let you scan old photos using your phone camera. Compared to flatbed scanners, they can be helpful in a pinch – and much faster.

If you're looking for a free mobile scanning app, take a look at Google PhotoScan (available on iOS and Android). The app will ask you to take a picture of each corner of the image (to stop any glare from showing) and will then composite them together into a single image.

When one of our experts tried out Google PhotoScan, we found that with a bit of practice, you could digitise a photo in about 20 seconds. Which makes it quite a speedy job if you only have a handful of pictures to digitise.

However, if you have lots of photos to scan, doing this manually can be a time-consuming process, and the results can vary significantly depending on the quality of your phone camera, the stability when taking the picture and the lighting available.

4. Send your snaps away

When you don't have time to scan your images yourself, or don't want to, you can send your photos to a specialist photo scanning lab. You can find plenty of these companies online, such as Digitize Media and Vintage Photo Lab. Most scan your pictures in very high quality and return them to you along with your digitised files on a memory stick.

If you're on a budget, check in with smaller, local photo labs to see if they're able to offer a competitive service.

How to keep digital photos safe

• Photo albums: These are easy to flick through with friends and family. You can't store anywhere near as many images as any other storage method, but this could force you to curate your photos and cast away the rubbish ones. Of course, the biggest drawback of photo albums is the danger of physical damage. See our pick of the best photo books.
• Writable DVDs and CDs: A cheap option, but space is fairly limited. If you’re storing a lot of photos or videos, you’ll need a stack of them. They’re also quite fragile.
• Hard drives: Great for backing up photos, as you get lots of space for your money. Traditional HDDs (hard disk drives) use moving parts to read and write data - that makes them cheaper, but more vulnerable to damage. Meanwhile, SSDs (solid-state drives) have no moving parts, so they’re more durable and faster, though usually more expensive per gigabyte. Our expert testing reveals the best external hard drives.
• USB sticks: These have plummeted in price over the past few years, although they still cost a lot more than any hard drives per GB of storage. While there isn’t much risk of mechanical failure, there’s a very real threat of forgetting which drawer you’ve tucked them away in. In our roundup of the best USB sticks, we measure speed, thermal performance and durability.

Want to take your photography to the next level? You need a proper camera – see our best compact cameras and best action cameras.

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