Preserve your photo albums by creating a digital backup. Look back on family weddings, birthdays and baby pictures without fear of them getting lost or destroyed by saving them digitally. Your digital copies will not only be safe and secure, you’ll be able to easily share with family and friends

The process of digitizing old photos does not have to be outrageously expensive or overly time consuming. With three ways to effectively digitize your photo collection, you can utilize a scanner, smart phone app or professional service to efficiently and effectively save your photos. Take a look at a few of the easiest and most effective options:

1. Handheld Wand Scanner

With the ability to scan photos, pages from magazines, textbooks, journals, posters, recipes and more, the TravelScan Pro 300 Handheld Wand Scanner simplifies your scanning process to just a swipe. It is lightweight and portable to take on-the-go and its rugged design stands up to continuous use. Delivering high-quality digital copies, the TravelScan Pro 300 creates crisp images to save as JPEGs or PDFs in grayscale, color, or black & white. It even comes with the AmbirScan Stitching software which lets you piece together scanned sections of your document into a single digital file, making it easy to digitize large images and documents. It can stitch up to 10 images, so even large-scale posters and blueprints are easily digitized.

Watch this quick video to learn more about the full benefits of the TravelScan Pro 300 Handheld Wand Scanner and start digitizing your photo collection today.

2. Smart Phone App

Google Photoscan is a great app to start out with when looking to digitize your photos. It is simple to use and only takes a couple of seconds to scan each photo. After you capture four images of your photo, Google Photoscan will stitch the images together for the highest-quality version possible. With automatic edge detection, smart rotation, perspective correction and glare reduction, this app has you covered. Google Photoscan is available for download for both iOS and Android devices.

3. Digitization Service

Let the professionals handle your photos. Services like Kodak Digitizing can handle photos, tapes, film reels, audio and more. While this option may be more costly, it saves you the time and effort of working through your photos manually on your own. Each piece of media you provide will be digitized by hand by professionals at their state-of-the-art facility. Choose your preferred conversion options from digital, DVD or the Cloud. The process takes approximately six to eight weeks and you will receive email updates along the way. Prices range from their most basic package at $69.99 to the most comprehensive option at $1,199.99. Learn more about which option best suits your needs on their website.