old photo albums made into shutterfly albums

i would like to make my enormous photo albums into more manageable shutterfly albums (better for the size of our new small home). is there an easy way i can get them to my phone (where i like to upload pix to shutterfly)? thanks

Just to confirm - we're talking about actual old fashioned photo albums? Slip in pockets or the really bad for your photos 'magnetic' type?

How many? 1 or 2? Or 5 to 10?

If yes, then someone needs to take each photo out, scan it, tweak it and then save it as a jpg. The photos need to be at least a few meg to be printable. Putting them all on your phone may not be feasible.

Define 'easy'. By easy, do you mean that you want to pay someone to do all that? Because even one album can be pretty labor intensive.

FWIW, when I have old photos that I want to move into the digital realm, I take a picture of them with my camera and upload them as I would any other photo image. Then I can fix the color, resize, crop, do what I have to do with them. Some of them are pasted into old photo albums, others are in the horrid albums with the photostatic backings that you can't remove the pictures from, so trying to scan them isn't going to work. Anyway, I find taking the picture gives me more flexibility than scanning them, and is quicker overall.

I think it would be pretty onerous, as Joy said....in addition, though the shutterfly books are nice as a gift, they can be pixely even with high res photos. I would think twice about replacing good quality original prints with photo books.

Shutterfly is very good and I have made dozens. However unless something has changed, they print on magazines stock.

Look at any company that uses photo paper instead.

Just did a Shutterfly album with several old photos (1970's/1980's) along with new photos taken on digital cameras and/or iPhone and both came out lovely. Once the old photos are scanned, Shutterfly will give you an alert on some of your photos indicating that they may not have enough resolution to be a great picture, but I never pay attention to that because when the project is complete, the photo always looks great.

adoramapix albums are way nicer than shutterfly but they cost more and might not be what you're looking for depending on the number of pictures you plan on using.

I know someone who does this as a side job (convert stacks of old photos into designed Shutterfly albums), but the work is time consuming and expensive. Probably only worth it for special occasion albums (50th anniversary, retirement, wedding, etc) and not just refreshing your bookshelf albums.

Cody, if you're taking a picture of a picture, you're also capturing the light and shadow of the room you're doing it in (and whatever surface the photo was printed on). It may be quicker than scanning - but how is it more versatile? You're stuck with however the picture appears in the room you're in ... added to what the photo actually looks like.

ligeti, I'm very careful when I shoot the copies. I control the lighting to minimize shadows, and the camera I use has a setting for shooting documents, so I can get in as close as I want, without glare. The pictures I am transferring this way are typically glued into an album, or stuck in one of those horrible photostatic/magnetic albums where you can't even remove the photos.

Scanning didn't help much and didn't give me any more control. This way, I can shoot using diffused daylight, I can add additional lighting if necessary from an oblique source and I can shoot wherever the lighting works best for the pictures/album I am dealing with. It's worked out pretty well for me, actually.

I used ScanCafe for 35mm slides to digital, and then use whichever vendor has what I need for the final destination- mugs, calendars, books. If you have many photos, you might consider using a scan service like that?

@rowerg, what's the time frame for ScanCafe? I have so many boxes of 35mm slides that I'd like to convert to digital - a while ago, it seemed to take about a minute a slide on the software I was asking about....has it gotten better now? We're talking about several thousand slides here......

ScanCafe is great. Takes them about 2 weeks for an order of slides. They did all mine and they look great. You get a DVD and an upload to whatever you choose (i.e. Dropbox).

Thanks, ligeti. I'll look into this. Would be nice to be able to really see those slides again!

I've used ScanCafe without issue for over 1000 slides. And while past performance is no guarantee of....I think you'll be fine.