What is EXIF data?

EXIF stands for exchangeable image file format, and it’s basically extra data tacked onto your image.

Back in the old days of film cameras, you had the option of printing a data right onto the photo itself in bright orange or red lettering. This was great to let you know when the photo was taken, but also left an unsightly mark on the corner of your image. However, at the time, this was the best way to catalog your photos. Many times the cameras date was also wrong, which made it all the more frustrating. When digital cameras and smartphones came out, this all changed. No longer was the data burned onto the corner of your digital image, but rather stored behind the scenes as part of the EXIF data of your image. Limited EXIF data is also stored on digital images from scanned photos, slides and negatives.

With each and every shot you take with your digital camera, the camera records not only the date and time, but lots of other data including things like shutter speed, whether the flash was on or off, plus other settings used for the shot — even sometimes geo-location, especially if using a smartphone with GPS capabilities.

How to access and view EXIF data?

Using Windows, you could select the image in question by right clicking it and then clicking properties. From here, navigate to the details tab which presents most of the data in a small window. Alternatively, you could also upload or link to the image (if it’s hosted online) to an online EXIF viewer such as Jeffrey’s EXIF viewer.

How to modify EXIF data?

It’s not often that you’d need to edit the EXIF data of your photos, but there are times when it’s useful such as if the date or time on your camera was incorrect, or if you wanted to add additional data such as a name or other tag to help you identify it in the future. Windows is actually great and letting you edit the data right from the details window after right clicking the image and selecting properties. However, not all of the items can be edited this way, such as geo-location tags.

How to remove EXIF data? Sometimes the EXIF data of your images might reveal more than you’d think. In some cases, it may be necessary to strip the EXIF data from the image before publishing or sharing over the internet.

If you’re using Windows: Eliminating the EXIF data is easy because Windows has a built in function for it. First, right click and select “Properties” on the image you’d like to edit. Then navigate to the “details” tab. Click the blue link at the bottom that says “Remove properties and personal information”.

From here, you can either select to remove portions of the EXIF data, or all of it, which will then create a backup copy with stripped data.

If you’re using Mac: To rid your images of EXIF data on a Mac, you’re going to need to download some extra software to help you out. The best one we’ve found is a small application called SmallImage. Once the program has been installed, open up the app and drag the photos you want to clean into its window. Uncheck the “Recompress at quality” box, since we want to keep the photos in their original high quality. Then, just click “Process” and you’ll see copies of all the photos show up in their folder. If you want to replace the original photos instead of creating copies, you can just un-check the “Add Suffix” box (as shown in the above photo), and it will just replace the original photos with clean ones.

What Scanner is Best for Photos?

Scanning your Family Photos

If you have a large collection of family photos or photo albums, you may have considered digitizing them yourself, or hiring a company to do it for you. There’s so many options in either case that it’s often difficult to know what to do. This article aims to help you make the most informed decision possible. At DVD Your Memories, we’ve been scanning photos for nearly 15 years and have scanned millions of people’s precious memories. If you want to scan your photos yourself and have a large collection, we recommend investing in a Canoscan900F Flatbed Scanner. That’s what we use for photo scanning in our four Photo Labs in Southern California. The scanner is expensive, though, and if you want high quality photo scans it’s more than likely to make the most sense to use a photo scanning company. Quality photo scanning is a more laborious process than it’s given credit for, so really we recommend using a company anyway.

Should You Really Scan Photos?

If you’ve got a large collection of family photos in envelopes from one hour photo labs or the like, you probably also have photo negatives of the same images. Those are the originals, and even though it’ll be more expensive to scan them per image than it will be per photo, we recommend doing that instead. Here’s why.

Picking a Scanning Company

If you’ve spent any time at all looking for photo scanning services, you’ve surely come across a few companies that will scan your photos for pennies on the dollar compared to other services. Our charges start at $0.49 per photo, and there are other companies who charge a tiny fraction of that. If they’re doing the work in the US, the reason the cost is so low is they’re using document scanners for your photos. If they’re not doing the work in the US, there’s a chance they’re using actual photo scanners. However, we recommend using a scanning company that is local for you. This is why.

Document Scanners

Document scanners were originally intended to save business time, money, and cabinet space. They’d do this by providing a quick way to digitize and catalogue lots of documents. Lots of entrepreneurs saw the potential of document scanning services, and created businesses that provided the service. It’s a massive industry now, projected to have a market value in the hundreds of billions by 2029. Given the size of the industry, it was inevitable that it would branch out into other areas. As more and more people realized how much more convenient it would be to have their family photos digitized, someone had the bright idea to provide cheap, low quality photo scanning with document scanners. Document scanners scan more photos at a time much more quickly than a high quality flatbed scanner. This ushered in the era of cheap “shoebox” photo scanning. Document scanners automatically feed the next photo into the scanner once the previous one is scanned. As such, there’s no need for a human to operate the machine, manually switching the photos between scans. For a more complete explanation of how they work, check out this explanation.

Price vs Quality

Shoebox photo scanning is certainly a great solution for a lot of people. If you just want any digital copy of your images, cheap shoebox photo scanning is 100% the way to go. However, the quality of your images isn’t going to be even close to what it would be if they were scanned by a human being operating a flatbed scanner. Take a look at the samples below and see the noticeable differences between flatbed and document photo scanning. The images on the left were scanned on a specialized Canoscan900F flatbed scanner, while the ones on the right were fed through a Kodak S1220 document scanner.

Issues with Document Scanners

As you can see, there is a noticeable difference in quality in the two scans. Document scanners have three main issues that do not occur with flatbed scanners:

Color Streaking

The biggest disparity between flatbed and document scanning is the streaking that happens. Particularly in the first image on the right, you’ll notice blue and green streaks running up and down the image. The reason that occurs is that the glass that holds the document picks up tiny dust particles left on your photo. Since document scanners feed the image mechanically through themselves, streaking happens all up and down the image where the dust particle came into contact with the image. That happens with flatbeds too, but since the photos remain stationary while the image sensor moves, there’s no streaking. On a document scanner, there’ll be a big vertical red line running up and down your grandmother’s body. That’s not what we consider archiving.

Faded Colors

The second problem lies in the darker areas of photos. On a high end monitor or when printing them, you’ll see a crisscross pattern of white across photos scanned on a document scanner. When the scanner feeds that image through the sensor rapidly, the sensor only has a tiny fraction of time to capture all of the data in the 24 square inches of the photo. As documents tend to be white, document scanners are designed to capture darker data on a white background. That doesn’t lend itself to quality scanning of dark photos. You’ll lose color and image data on every photo that’s fed through a document scanner, and it is often very noticeable.

Prone to Damaging Photos

The third problem is that since a document scanner works mechanically, it’s got a good chance of trapping your photo in the scanner. It might mangle the photo and destroy the image before you can get a clean scan. You’re left with no digital image and a badly damaged paper original.

Our Process for Scanning Photos

At DVD Your Memories, our photo scanning has several quality touchpoints. We recommend doing it this way if you’re doing it at home. If you’re hiring a company, check that they follow these steps, or at least something like them. For a more complete account of our process, read this. If your images are dusty (which, remember, creates scan quality problems), we use compressed air to clean them. Our technicians wear microfiber gloves so they don’t leave any fingerprints on your photos. Once your photos are cleaned, they’re carefully and manually scanned on a Canoscan900F Flatbed Scanner. Once scanned, your photos are placed back where they came from. Then, in post production, a technician will make sure your images are all rotated in the right orientations. Any white from the bed of the scanner that made it into your scan gets cropped, and if it needs it, we can do color correction. After that, we’ll do quality control on the images in post production. We redo any scans that the technician on quality control deems not up to scratch. Then, and only then, do we consider the order done.

Don’t forget to check out Ellen Browning Scripps Elementary School Fall Festival in Scripps Ranch on October 19th at 5:30pm. Bring the whole family for a fun evening of games, bingo, cake walks, face painting, food vendors, teacher play date silent auction, and much more. DVD Your Memories will be donating some gift certificates good for any of our transfer services including video to DVD, image scanning and film transfer in San Diego!

When it comes to scanning oversized photos and prints in a detailed manner, nothing comes close to the Epson 10000XL Wide-Format graphics arts scanner. Although much larger than your typical flatbed scanner, this unit can scan photos and prints sized up to 12.2 by 17.2 inches on one pass! This is great for artists and graphic illustrators who use abnormal medium sizes, but also works wonders for digital transfer and photo scanning companies to accomodate their flatbed scanners with a unit that can scan much larger than the standard 8 by 10 inch photos.

Here are some of the key features of the 10000XL:

2,400 x 4,800 optical resolution, 3.8 Dmax optical density 48-bit color depth, 16-bit grayscale; 50% to 200% zoom A3 sized scanning surface for originals up to 12.2 by 17.2 inches Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, MonacoEZcolor with reflective IT8 Target USB 2.0, Firewire, optional networking; PC and Mac compatible

The great thing about this scanner is it’s ability to easily stich together multiple large format works. The scanning bed itself is large and the lid lifts up smoothly, and also can be removed and replaced easily. In addition, the scan bed itself is very shallow, unlike many office scanners which have a ledge almost one-half inch deep. This is important in case you want to scan something very large and “stitch” the parts together. When the scan bed is deeply recessed, there is a visible shadow at the edges, which makes it difficult to piece together with other scans.

The bundled software also does a great job at scratch and dust removal and color enhancement. Although we use Adobe Photoshop for our image correction work, we’re confident the bundled software contains everything you need to accomplish basic image cleanup, and it’s easy to install and learn, too.

This scanner has worked great for DVD Your Memories by allowing us to easily scan LP album art for when we do LP records to CD transfers, scan scrapbooks, yearbooks or other oversized books or volumes. All in all, we highly recommend this scanner, and it’s even the same model we use to scan oversized photos and prints at a great resolution in all of our stores.

Looking for more information? Check out the 10000XL on Amazon!

At DVD Your Memories, we often need to get many people, across many stores, involved in a discussion. Trying to schedule a meeting where everyone is free, and everyone has to be there for the entire thing, is often more trouble than it is worth. We’ve tried a lot of software solutions, in all cases the organizational qualities made contributions confusing and hard to follow. That is, until we found Rizzoma.

Rizzoma is exactly what we were looking for; it’s a space where comments and responses are well organized and intuitive, where individuals can review and comment on their own time, and all relevant information can stay, easy to access, for everyone involved without making information hard to sift through.

For example, several employees get together once a month to put together a “news update” for our employees, which can include announcing top sales people, upcoming company events, new technology we’re interested in (like, say… Rizzoma?), etc.. People could then comment, post photos, share, and add to the company’s history, as well as see past updates. These would get pretty long, but it was great to refer new employees to it and show them who we are, and what we get excited about. It’s a pretty good reflection of our culture.

We also have a newsletter that goes out to our customers, which typically has a theme, a promotional item, and some other interesting information about our company. Rizzoma makes brainstorming on this stuff really easy, since we just create a new topic, list basic elements, and everyone can give suggestions. People comment on what they like, what might or might not work, and likelihood of success. The staff contributes, whenever they have time over the next couple days, and then we know what direction we’re going to go with the newsletter.

Part of the brilliance of Rizzoma is that even when people are working on or adding to a topic at different times, it’s very easy to tell what they’re commenting on, as well as the fact that a new comment has been made on that topic, due to the way the information is organized. This feature alone has increased our productivity and decreased time spent in meetings, and has eliminated email chains, people asking to forward or resend responses, and conversation context being lost in all of the cross responses; All commentary, context, and relevant information is right there for all participants to see.

Frankly, we think it’s awesome. Try it out for yourself at https://www.rizzoma.com

Youtube is a great service allowing anyone with an internet connection to upload digital videos indefinitely onto their servers to share with others. Since Youtube was developed after digital video had already gained massive popularity around the globe, it’s a bit more complicated to upload analog video sources, such as what you’d find on VHS and camcorder video tapes. However, for many of us, our most important life moments are stored away on these tapes… tapes which can be a pain to watch due to all of the extra cables and equipment you need to set up on your television just to watch. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a way to upload VHS and all of these other tapes to Youtube and watch them any time?

The good news is that there is a way to do this, but it’s a little more complicated than uploading a video that is already in a digital format.

The first step is to gather up the video tapes you would like to upload to Youtube and find a company to tranfer the video tapes to hard drive. If you’re technically experienced, you can even perform this step yourself with a few additional items. If you’re looking for how to transfer video to hard drive, we have a couple of quick guides:
How to transfer and capture MiniDV tapes to your computer
How to capture video using Canopus ADVC110

Now, once you have a hard drive with your video files loaded on it, it’s time to upload them to Youtube. First, you’ll need to create a Youtube account (only if you don’t already have one), as you must have one in order to upload. Once the account has been created, you can begin your uploading process by clicking the “Upload” button on the top bar.

On this screen, you can either click the “Select files from your computer” button, or simply drag and drop your videos right into the window. Once selected, the video will immediately begin to upload.

As it’s uploading, you can set the title and description, as well as some additional information about your video. When the upload process is completed, your video will now be visible for the world to see!

NOTE: You can also set your videos for private viewing using the video privacy settings.

If planning to get a large collection of photos scanned through a media transfer company, there’s some easy guidelines you should follow and some things to look out for. For big scanning jobs, it’s not always practical to get it done yourself, as it could take quite a while to get through all of them, especially if you have a deadline to meet. Bulk photo scanning can be for a number of different things like your company would like all original photographs scanned and indexed so they can be disposed of to save space, you want to complete a personal project which requires the photos to be in a digital format first.

If the photos are important to you, it’s wise to find a business that specializes in photo scanning. A local company would be the safest option for the protection and safety of your images. But what can you do to prevent your photos from being possibly ruined or a poor scanning job?

There are a number of things you can do to try to avoid this, some common sense and we also offer some tips and advice for you to try out as well.

When you contact the company, which is actually best to do by phone to get a better feel for who you’re going to be dealing with, ask questions about the service such as:

What quality do you scan at? Most places will scan your photos at somewhere between 300 and 600 DPI. Be careful they are not scanning at too low of a resolution, as it will create poor quality digital images. Most modern flatbed scanners are capable of cleaner, higher resolution scans than compared to earlier models or document scanners.

What type of scanners do you guys use? This is an important question to ask as it will give you insight into how the final product will look. For the best quality, we recommend going with a company that scans all of your photos with dedicated flatbed scanners. Flatbed scanners don’t pull the photo through the machine like document scanners do. Pulling the photo through the scanner can result in RGB streaking throughout the image, faded colors, and even damaged photos.

How long will the process take? If the turnaround time is important to you, be sure to ask how long it will take to get your final images. Some companies have long turnaround times due to the massive volume they receive on a daily basis, and could even take months to get your images back. Typically, local companies can work with you on your turnaround time by providing a rush service, or getting it done in the time you specify.

What does the photo scanning process involve? Make sure you know what kind of service you’ll receive from the company you choose. Will they crop/rotate your photos? Are your photos cleaned of dust prior to scanning? Do they come on a DVD?

What you’re looking for are detailed answers to these questions, and if they don’t know the answer to any of these questions, it might be best to look elsewhere! If they give you detailed answers plus even a little more information about what you’re asking, this is always a good sign that the person there knows what they’re talking about.

Another tip is to actually visit the place where the work is done if possible so you can meet the staff and possibly witness for yourself the process going on. Don’t think that this is rude or too forward; they should welcome you with open arms for a quick tour if they are a reputable company who are confident in what they do.

Looking for photo scanning services? Check out our local stores below! Photo scanning San Diego Photo scanning Orange County Photo scanning Los Angeles Photo scanning Denver