I have hundreds of photo prints & negatives I took with a 35mm SLR from the late 1980s until 2002 when I finally bought a digital camera.

While some are of minimal interest, I have hundreds that are significant because of the target plus now also age, i.e. photos of some places where cameras/photos were off-limits, and that 30+ years later, the sites are abandoned or long-gone, thus my photos would have some historic interest.

I've been scanning them off & on over the years, but its a monotonous process with my 5+ year old multifunction machine & basic scanning software -- probably taking about 90 seconds per photo to scan it at 1200dpi, caption it & then save it.

There's a professional photo scanning service called PhotoPanda -- http://www.photopanda.org that seems to be exactly what I'm looking for, except:

1. They only scan at 600dpi & the digital format is .jpg (I assume no compression). For many photos, 600dpi is good-enough, but for a few hundred, I want them scanned at the highest resolution possible, so they can be enlarged to pull out minor details, for example, seeing individual antennas on a military command post radio tower.

2. I understand that for absolute best image quality, the 35mm photo negatives should be used, rather than a photo print (especially one that may now be 25+ years old...), and PhotoPanda just scans from prints.


PhotoPanda sends-back the original prints, plus the now .jpg images. I don't mind jpg, and size of the digital image isn't a concern, I just need the format to be something that is pretty universal and easy to share with others. Right now, most of the 1200dpi scans I'm doing at home come out to being about 7 or 8MB .jpg file sizes.


It's important to understand that the desire is, once an image is digitized & then backed-up on & off-site, the goal is to be able to destroy the original 35mm negative & print in order to free-up space/clutter in my home, so the originals won't be around 5 or 10 years ago to re-scan if there's some huge improvement in technology, so I want to have it done with the best technology currently available. though cost is definitely a factor for me.

Any suggestions on a service similar to PhotoPanda, but that can scan negatives as-well as prints, and will do 1200dpi or better?


Thanks!

/-/oolie