What does a shoebox of prints cost to digitize?
Two numbers decide this for most people. ScanMyPhotos sells a flat-rate prepaid box that holds an average of 1,800 4x6 prints and scans the lot for $145 with shipping included, which works out to about eight cents a picture in 2026.
The home route has a different shape. The cost is not per photo, it is the scanner plus your evenings. DPReview priced the Epson Perfection V600 flatbed at $229.99 when it tested the scanner on film in 2019, and that machine takes one or two prints at a time.
Run the arithmetic before buying anything. At a generous twenty seconds per print, counting the lid and the straightening, 1,800 pictures is ten hours at the desk.
Under a few hundred prints, home scanning wins outright. You already own the evenings, and there is a decent chance the all-in-one printer in the corner already has a flatbed good enough for paper originals.
Past a thousand prints the mail-in box costs less than the hardware and takes none of the evenings. That is the whole decision, and it turns on how big the pile is rather than on which service has the better website.
Mixed closets change the answer again. If the same shelf holds home video, the calculation looks like the one in the guide to digitizing VHS tapes, where finding working hardware is the hard part rather than the price.
What resolution should you scan at?
The federal government has already answered this for prints. Under 36 CFR Part 1236, Subpart E, agencies digitizing permanent photographic records must "produce image files at a minimum of 400 ppi sized to the source document."
400 ppi across a 4x6 print is a 1,600 by 2,400 pixel file. That reprints at the original size and survives a modest crop, which is all a family snapshot is ever asked to do.
600 ppi is the sensible setting at home, because the only thing the extra resolution costs is disk space and the scan is a one-time job. Going to 1,200 ppi on a drugstore print mostly resolves the texture of the paper.
Save prints as JPEG at the highest quality the software offers. Reach for TIFF only for the handful of images that are genuinely irreplaceable, since those files are several times larger and a lot of photo apps handle them badly.
Whatever the setting, choose it once and do not change it halfway through the box. A folder scanned at three different resolutions is a folder somebody scans again.
Do negatives and slides need different gear?
They do, and the reason is physical. A 35mm negative is roughly one inch by one and a half. A scanner has to magnify that original rather than copy it at size, so the resolution that works for a print is nowhere near enough for film.
Federal guidance stops at the edge of the problem. Subpart E of 36 CFR Part 1236 covers paper and photographic prints and leaves negatives, transparencies and roll film out of scope, which is a fair signal that film is the harder job.
What film needs is a scanner with a light source in the lid rather than only under the glass. The Epson Perfection V600 ships with two film holders for exactly that, and DPReview noted in 2019 that its highest resolution setting only appears once the software is switched into Pro mode.
Dedicated 35mm scanners from Plustek and others do better on grain and on dust, at the cost of taking one strip or a few mounted slides at a time. They are slow in a way that matters when a carousel holds hundreds of slides.
Mail-in labs price film per frame rather than per box. That is why a single slide carousel can cost more to digitize than an entire shoebox of prints, and why it is worth counting slides separately before ordering anything.
Is the phone in your pocket good enough?
For photographs that are not leaving somebody else's house, a phone is the only realistic answer. The problem with photographing a photograph is glare: gloss paper, album sleeves and glass frames all throw the ceiling light straight back into the lens.
Google's free PhotoScan app gets around that by taking several frames instead of one. The user moves the phone through four corner positions and the app merges what it captured.
Google researchers Ce Liu, Michael Rubinstein, Mike Krainin and Bill Freeman described the method on the Google Research blog in April 2017, as software that can "carefully align and combine several slightly different pictures of a print to separate the glare from the image underneath."
What a phone cannot do is hold a measured resolution across the whole frame. Every capture sits at a slightly different distance, angle and white balance, so a phone-scanned album ends up looking like an album somebody photographed.
Use it at a relative's kitchen table, where the alternative is no copy at all. Use a scanner or a lab for the box that is coming home in the car.
Where can you still get photos scanned in 2026?
Not at the warehouse club, and that still catches people out. Costco closed the photo counter in every one of its US warehouses on February 14, 2021, ending passport photos, photo restoration and the negative and slide digitizing that sat alongside them.
The company was blunt about the reason. As PetaPixel reported in January 2021, Costco told members that "since the introduction of camera phones and social media, the need for printing photos has steeply declined, even though the number of pictures taken continues to grow."
What is left in 2026 is three places. Mail-in labs work by the box and turn a closet into a download link. Independent camera shops work by the hour and charge like it, which is the right call for damaged or oversized originals. The third place is your own desk.
Chain drugstores still print photographs in most US towns, but scanning a stack of old prints is not a counter service the way it was in the one-hour era.
Where to find one today. A flat-rate prepaid box from ScanMyPhotos runs $145 in 2026 and holds an average of 1,800 4x6 prints with shipping included, which is the cheapest per-print route once the pile passes a thousand. Slides and negatives are billed per frame, so count those before ordering.
How do you keep the files from vanishing?
Scanning is the easy half of the job. One folder on one laptop is not an archive. It is a photograph of your photographs, waiting on a drive failure.
Keep three copies: the working folder, an external drive, and a cloud account, with at least one of them outside the house. That covers the two failure modes that actually destroy family pictures, which are hardware death and fire.
Name the files while the box is still open on the table. Something like 1987-summer-lake-01 costs ten minutes now and saves an hour of squinting later, and a date in the filename survives every software migration that follows.
Then keep the paper. Prints have outlasted a long line of formats that were supposed to replace them, and the companies that bet against paper did not all come out well: Kodak went through bankruptcy and Polaroid went through a long series of owners before the name came back.
A scan is a copy, not a replacement. The negative in the sleeve still holds more detail than the file sitting next to it, and it will still be readable by anything with a light behind it in fifty years.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to scan old photos in 2026?
Scanning old photos costs about eight cents a print through a bulk mail-in box in 2026: ScanMyPhotos charges $145 for a flat-rate prepaid box that holds an average of 1,800 4x6 prints, with shipping included. Scanning at home costs nothing per photo but means buying a scanner first, and DPReview priced the film-capable Epson Perfection V600 flatbed at $229.99 back in 2019.
What resolution should I use to scan old photos and negatives?
Scan prints at 400 ppi or better. That is the minimum US federal agencies must meet under 36 CFR Part 1236, Subpart E, when they digitize permanent photographic records, and 600 ppi is a safe home setting. Negatives and slides need far more, because a 35mm frame is about one inch by one and a half and has to be magnified rather than copied at size.
Can I scan old photos with my phone instead of a scanner?
Yes, and for albums that are staying in somebody else's house it is the practical choice. Google's free PhotoScan app captures several frames of a print and merges them to remove the glare a single phone photo would leave, a method Google researchers described on the Google Research blog in April 2017. A phone still will not hold a measured 400 ppi across the frame the way a flatbed scanner does.