Old family photographs and old family paperwork both need digitizing, but they aren’t the same job. A typed document is flat, matte, and high-contrast — easy to photograph cleanly. A printed photo is often glossy, curled at the corners, and faded, all of which fight against a phone camera in ways plain paper doesn’t.
Why photos are the harder case
Three things make photos the harder case. Glare: glossy photo paper reflects light directly back at the camera, especially from a phone’s flash or an overhead light — the fix is natural, indirect light and a flash turned off, angled slightly if a straight-on shot still catches a reflection. Curling: old photos rarely lie flat, so press gently at the corners, or weigh them down briefly, before capturing, since a curled edge captured as-is comes out warped rather than cropped clean. Faded color: nothing captured in the photo can restore color that’s genuinely faded on the original — a scan preserves exactly what’s there, which is still worth doing before it fades further.
Scan to PDF works the same way for photos as documents — capture with your phone’s camera, crop to the photo’s edges, and combine multiple photos into one file. See How to Scan a Document with Your Phone for the capture and cropping mechanics in full. Already have the photos as loose image files, say from a previous camera scan or a phone gallery? Image to PDF combines them without the cropping step, since there’s no physical original to photograph anymore.
A photo album page and a related document — a certificate, a letter — can be scanned together if they belong together, but don’t mix them into one long undifferentiated file. Photos generally don’t need OCR since there’s no text to recognize; documents do, if you want them searchable later. Keeping them apart makes it clear which processing step applies to which file.
Tidying up a long scanning session
Working through a box of photos in one sitting means the resulting file will have a few captures out of order, a duplicate or two, and something photographed sideways. Edit PDF shows every page as a thumbnail you can drag, rotate, or delete — quicker than rescanning, and it keeps every page at the quality it was captured at.
Once photos are digitized, How to Send a Batch of Photos as One File covers combining a set into a single file that arrives in order and at full quality, rather than as a dozen separate attachments. And certificates, policies, and IDs need different handling from photographs, but they belong in the same organized place — How to Build a Digital Document Archive for Your Family covers what to include and how to protect it.
Start scanning with the free Scan to PDF tool — no app, skip the sign-up, skip the watermark, and nothing kept on our servers.