Photo Scanning Service in Chapel Hill, NC

All of Orange County — Chapel Hill itself plus Carrboro, Hillsborough and Efland — along with the surrounding Triangle and the edge of Chatham County. That takes in Durham, Cary, Apex, Morrisville and Raleigh to the east, Pittsboro, Fearrington Village, Bynum and Siler City to the south, and Mebane, Graham, Saxapahaw and Snow Camp toward Alamance County.

Photo scanning is not a route service the way our shredding is, so there is no coverage boundary to fall outside of. Collections arrive by tracked shipping from anywhere in the Triangle, and every job is scanned by the same staff on the same equipment and returned in the same digital formats. If your town is not named above, call and ask.

Photo scanning is priced per photo, and the rate drops as the count goes up, so a full collection costs less per image than a small batch. A minimum job charge applies, which means a single envelope and a few hundred prints land closer together than you would expect. Scanning at 600 dpi costs more per photo than 300 dpi, and most families run the whole collection at 300 and pull a few dozen favorite photos at 600.

Photo enhancements are included in the scanning price rather than sold as an upgrade, and labeling your sets from index cards you slip into the box costs nothing. Custom folder organization runs a small per-folder fee. Because the work is done here in the Carolinas, the job typically costs 10 to 25% less than the national mail-in services. Quotes are free — tell us roughly how many old photos, slides and albums you have.

Yes to all three. 35mm slides are scanned at 2500 or 4000 dpi depending on how much detail you want pulled out of the film, and prints up to 8x10 run through the automatic feeder. Anything up to 11x17 is captured overhead, including scrapbook pages holding multiple images, which come back as separate scanned images. Photos still mounted in an album are scanned and cropped in place.

Chapel Hill families often turn up a mix — slide carousels, church directories, wedding albums, newsprint clippings gone brittle. Fragile prints and thick stock go on the flatbed rather than the feeder, sorted at intake, so one photo digitizing service covers the whole box. Once those precious memories exist in digital formats, we can shred and recycle any originals you no longer want for a percentage of the job cost.