Digitizing a box of documents and photos

August 10, 2024 8:43 PM

A relative of mine past away a couple years ago, and left me a large collection of documents and photos. I'd like to find a service that would be able to digitize them, so I could sort through them more easily.

These are mostly photos, journals, and writings from their life and other family members, along with a few books.

Unfortunately, I live on the other side of the country and my brother has been storing them for me. I'd like to to pay for him to bring them to a document scanning service to avoid needing to ship them or spend time sorting through them.

It seems like most document scanning services are more commercially focused, so it's a little hard to tell how flexible they'd be dealing with a bunch or irregular documents and photos. Does anyone have any experience doing something like this, or have any recommendations around New York City?

posted by axlan to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

The photos probably won't be too much of a problem. The journals are going to require more manual work from the scanners, (unless you are willing to have all the pages torn out for easier scanning). Better that you are looking around NYC than out in the sticks somewhere.

I have only tackled the "old hard disks from computers that are so old they don't have USB ports or anything", and that was a pain. Haven't yet tried to figure out "all the thousands of photos we have printed out" portion.

But there certainly are places in NYC that will digitize a lot of photos and such. Hope someone local can offer a suggestion.
posted by Windopaene at 8:56 PM on August 10

I don't have any specific recommendations, but law firms generally use a copy service to go out to a location to scan documents in response to a subpoena or records request, or to get digital copies of clients' records. Usually these are just papers and photos and things in files and bankers boxes, but sometimes it'll be something more involved that will require more delicate work. So that might be somewhere to start, and if you have any friends or acquaintances (or any mefites?) who work at a law office in NYC, they might be able to recommend a specific copy service to you. Otherwise, copy service or litigation support are search terms that can help you find a place that will do this. Of course, for more fiddly scanning work, they'll charge more.
posted by yasaman at 9:22 PM on August 10

I've been very happy with Everpresent's work digitizing decades of my families old 35mm slides. They do photos, videos, audio recordings, and documents. They've got 19 locations in New York.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:55 AM on August 11 [2 favorites]

I wonder if posting this as a gig for MLS or archive grad students could be a nice way to get a variety of documents digitized.
posted by forkisbetter at 9:06 AM on August 11

There was a similar question a while back that might be helpful. Specific to home movies, but many of the services handle multiple medias.

I used Memory Fortress to transfer old films and slides. They also do photos and scrapbooks. Not sure if they can do random documents, but if they are a standard size, it might be possible.
posted by amusebuche at 8:26 PM on August 17