Digitize Old Photos?

[gabkwong]

I want to organize and save my old photos, circa prior to digital photography! Hope some of you can share your experience before I going down the wrong path. My collection includes:

1. loose prints w/o negatives
2. prints w/o negative stuck on photo album that won't come off
3. prints w negative
4. negatives w/o prints

What is the best method to handle each type of photos? All I have is a all-in-one (fax/copy/scan) scanner connected to my laptop.

Any help is appreciated!

Gab

[HudsonHawk]

A very good digital camera, lighting and a tripod. In other words just take digital photographs of the pictures.

[motorollow]

I just used the scanner on my all in one printer.

[channelmaniac]

Scanner. You want to scan them 2x - once in grayscale and once in full color and at as high of a resolution as you can.

Save in a TIFF format (lossless, no compression)

You can always make the digital pictures smaller and lower resolution but you can't go make a smaller picture larger without suffering quality issues.

[Squid]

I picked up a HP photosmart scanner for that purpose. Will scan prints, slides and negatives.
It's a time consuming job but definitely worth the time.