Getting through
the whole shoebox.

Sort before you digitise anything

Digitising is the slow part, so the cheapest minute you will spend on this project is the one where you decide a photograph does not need it. Lay everything out and make three piles.

• Worth the effort. People you can name, moments you remember, anything that exists only once.
• Near-duplicates. Most film rolls contain three attempts at the same picture. Keep the best one and set the others aside — do not throw them away, just do not scan them yet.
• Already fine. Plenty of prints from the 1990s onward are in good condition and need digitising, not restoring. Mixing these in is what makes a collection feel endless.

Work in album or envelope order and keep it. Whatever order the prints are in usually encodes something — a holiday, a year, a roll of film — and it is much harder to reconstruct later than to preserve now.

Scanning and photographing

A flatbed scanner gives the best result and is slow. A phone is far quicker and, done carefully, is genuinely good enough for most prints. Mixing both is normal: scan the irreplaceable ones, photograph the rest.

If you are scanning

• 600 dpi for anything you might reprint, 300 dpi if it is only ever going to be looked at on a screen. Going higher on a small print mostly enlarges the grain.
• Turn off the scanner’s own dust removal and auto-colour. They make decisions you cannot reverse, and they do a worse job than software that can see the whole photograph at once.
• Scan album pages as pages. Do not prise old prints off adhesive card — scan the whole page and separate the photographs afterwards.

If you are photographing prints

• Indirect daylight beats any lamp. A window on an overcast day, print flat on a table, no direct sun.
• Get square-on and back off. Shoot from directly above and zoom slightly rather than holding the phone close, which distorts the edges.
• Watch for glare on glossy prints. Tilt the print rather than the phone, and take a second frame if a highlight lands on a face.
• Do not crop as you go. Leave a margin — straightening and reframing is easier done later, when it can be undone.

Restoring in batches

Once the files exist, the work is mostly waiting. Add a batch, let it run, and review afterwards rather than watching each one — reviewing as you go is what turns an evening into a week.

Revelo assesses each photograph on its own and builds a restoration for that image rather than applying one setting across the batch, which matters when a shoebox contains a faded colour print, a black-and-white portrait and a phone snap of a page. Your originals are never modified: restored versions are written separately, so a result you dislike costs you nothing.

BeforeAfter Revelo↔Two young children on a playground swing, photographed in the 1980s — drag to reveal more of the restored version

Exporting so you only do this once

• Keep the originals. The scan is the negative now. Back it up somewhere separate and do not overwrite it, whatever you do to the copies.
• PNG for the archive, JPEG for sharing. Export the lossless version for storage and make the smaller, convenient copies from it rather than the other way round.
• Name things while you still remember. Year, place, people. Nobody has ever regretted this and everybody regrets skipping it.
• Do the second pile later. The near-duplicates you set aside are a much easier job once the important ones are done, and you may find you no longer need them.