← All guides · 2026-09-27 · Updated 2026-11-13 · PhotoUnfade team

How to Digitize Old Photos: Scanning Settings That Actually Matter

Digitizing a box of old prints is the single best preservation decision you can make — the originals will keep fading no matter how carefully you store them, but a good digital copy stops the clock. The catch: most people scan at settings that throw away exactly the detail they will later need for restoration. Here is what actually matters, and what is marketing noise.

What are the correct scanning settings, at a glance?

If you want the short version before the detail, this is the table professionals use:

The rest of this guide explains why each row matters and what goes wrong when you get it wrong.

What resolution should I scan old photos at?

Scan prints at 600 dpi. For a standard 4×6 print that produces roughly a 12-megapixel file — enough detail to restore damage, enough to reprint at the original size with quality to spare, and enough headroom to crop into a face. Here is the full breakdown:

• 300 dpi is the floor. Fine for a quick share, but thin for restoration — scratches and grain get mushed together with real detail.
• 600 dpi is the right default. This is what professional archival labs use for prints.
• 1200 dpi only for two cases: very small originals (wallet prints, tiny snapshots) or severely damaged photos where you want maximum information for reconstruction. Beyond that, file sizes balloon and you are mostly scanning scanner noise.

For slides and negatives, go much higher — 2400 to 4000 dpi. A 35mm negative is tiny; it needs the resolution to produce a usable file. This requires a scanner with a transparency unit or a dedicated film scanner.

What file format should I use?

Scan your archival master as TIFF (uncompressed or LZW-compressed). TIFF is lossless — every save keeps every pixel. JPEG discards data on every save, and the artifacts it leaves (blocky smearing around edges) are exactly the kind of damage that confuses restoration software later.

The practical workflow: scan to TIFF, keep those files as your master archive, and export JPEG copies for sharing, printing and restoration work. Storage is cheap; a lost original scan is not.

⚠️ Never re-scan or re-save a JPEG to "improve" it. The data is already gone, and each save discards a little more. If you need better quality, go back to the physical print.

What color depth and scanner settings are correct?

Set color depth to 48-bit (sometimes labeled "Millions of Colors+" or "16 bits per channel"). This preserves tonal information in shadows and highlights that 24-bit flattens away — and faded old photos live entirely in compressed shadows and blown highlights.

Then disable every automatic enhancement your scanner offers: Digital ICE, auto color restore, auto exposure, dust removal, unsharp mask, "vivid" modes. This feels counterintuitive, but it is important:

• Auto-corrections are destructive and non-reversible — you cannot undo them later because you never saved the original.
• They guess wrong on aged photos, often pushing warm-toned vintage prints toward an unnatural cool cast.
• Digital ICE physically cannot work on black-and-white silver gelatin prints (it treats the metallic silver image as a defect) and will destroy them.

Scan flat and neutral. Fix the image afterward, where every step is undoable and you are the one making the judgment calls.

How should I handle fragile old prints?

1. Clean the scanner glass first with a lint-free microfiber cloth. One fingerprint shows up on every single scan. Do not spray cleaner onto the glass — spray the cloth.
2. Never use ammonia-based glass cleaner near photographs. Fumes alone can damage emulsion.
3. Handle prints by the edges. Fingerprints on the emulsion are permanent.
4. Wear cotton gloves for negatives and slides only. For prints, clean dry hands give better grip — gloves make slippery prints more likely to drop and crease.
5. Do not press the lid down on brittle, cracked or curling photos. Old emulsion cracks under pressure. Instead, leave the lid slightly open and drape a black cloth over the photo to block ambient light, or weigh it gently with a clean foam pad.

Should I scan the back of the photo too?

Yes — this is the step genealogists never skip and everyone else forgets. The back of an old print frequently holds the only surviving evidence of who and when: names in pencil, dates, a photographer's studio stamp with a city and street address, or a processing lab's date code.

A studio stamp can date a photo to within a few years, because studios moved and renamed over time. Scan backs at 300 dpi in grayscale. Twenty years from now, that scan will be worth more than the front.

If the back gives you a name, a city or a date but not a face, our guide to identifying unknown people in old photos walks through the full process: dating the print by its physical process, reading clothing and studio marks, and comparing faces without fooling yourself.

How do I digitize photos without a scanner?

A modern phone camera can produce acceptable results if you control the light. Set up near a window on an overcast day, or use two lamps at 45° angles on either side to eliminate hotspots:

• Lay the photo flat on a matte, neutral surface.
• Never use flash — it creates a glare spot exactly where the face usually is.
• Fill the frame with the photo; do not shoot from a distance and crop.
• Hold the camera parallel to the table, directly above the center. Use a copy stand, a stack of books, or your phone's level guide.
• Tap to focus, then lock exposure (long-press on most phones) before shooting.
• Shoot in RAW if your phone supports it.

Phone photos work well for restoration. They are not archival — a flatbed scan is still the better master copy when you can get one. If a phone capture is your only option — a framed print, a glued album page, or a photo on a relative's wall — our guide to restoring a photo of a photo covers the full shooting technique and what restoration can fix afterward.

How should I name and back up the scans?

Name files with the date first so they sort chronologically: 1948-06_Smith-wedding_Edmund-and-Rose.jpg. Avoid special characters and spaces if you plan to use cloud sync tools.

Then apply the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two different media, with one offsite. In practice: your computer, an external drive, and cloud storage. A single hard drive is not a backup — drives fail in clusters, often right after a family event when everyone has been copying photos around.

What should I do once everything is scanned?

Digitizing stops the loss but does not reverse it. The scans will still show the yellowing, fading, scratches and soft focus the originals have. That is the next step, and it is much faster than it used to be.

One practical note on the scanning itself: work in batches and do not stop to fix anything as you go. Scan the whole box first at consistent settings, name the files as you go, and only then start restoring. Switching between "scanning mode" and "editing mode" is the single biggest reason a shoebox project stalls halfway — people get impatient, start tweaking individual scans, lose momentum, and never finish the box. Capture everything first; improve it second.

Start with the photos that matter most — faces first, then unique moments, then duplicates you can let go of. If you want to try AI restoration, PhotoUnfade gives you three free restorations with no account and no credit card, which is enough to judge whether your particular photos will respond well before you commit to the whole shoebox. Our step-by-step restoration guide covers what AI can and cannot fix, our water damage guide covers the urgent cases, and our scratch repair guide covers the most common injury of all.