Dr. Patricia Caldwell(click for bio)

Embrance Ambassador

How to Photograph Old Prints With Your Phone

The box is on the kitchen table and there is no scanner in the house. Everything the service needs is in there, on paper, in no order at all, and the only copier you own is the phone in your pocket. That is fine. A phone will do this well, and it will do it tonight.

The catch is the part nobody mentions. A copy that looks perfect on a screen the width of your hand can come apart completely on a screen the size of a door, and the first anyone finds out is when the room has gone quiet and their face is ten feet wide at the front of it. Funeral homes will crop what you send them and turn it the right way up, and most say plainly somewhere in their instructions that they do not repair or restore photographs. So this part belongs to you, whether or not anybody said so. It stays yours even if they assemble the whole video, since they build it from the folder you hand over; whether to let the funeral home make the slideshow at all is a separate decision, with its own tradeoffs.

None of it is difficult. It is ten minutes of setup at a window, once, and then the box is just repetition.

Why a phone photo of a photo goes wrong

There are three ways this fails, and they are worth being able to name, because each one has a different fix.

Glare. A print is a physical object with a surface, and that surface reflects. The flash fires, the light hits the paper flat on and comes straight back into the lens, and a white bloom lands across somebody's face. A ceiling light does the same thing more quietly, leaving a soft pale smear that you will not notice until it is large.

Softness. One hand, a phone tilted forward, a dim room. Indoors the camera holds the shutter open longer than you would guess, and in that fraction of a second your hand moves. Nothing looks obviously wrong. The edges just stop being crisp.

A leaning rectangle. You sit in the chair and lean over the print, so the phone leans too. The far edge of the print ends up further from the lens than the near edge, and a rectangle comes out as a trapezoid, wider at the bottom than the top. The same tilt also means one end of the print sits outside the focus while the other end is in it.

All three get through for the same reason: you check the result on the phone, at arm's length, about three inches across. At that size the picture is smaller than the flaw. On a projector there is nothing left to hide behind. The glare opens into a white hole, the softness turns to mush, and the lean is obvious to every person in the room.

Light it without a flash

If you take one thing from this page, take this: turn the flash off before you start. Not automatic. Off.

Automatic flash will fire indoors almost every time, and firing a light straight at a flat, shiny surface is the most reliable way there is to ruin a copy. On an iPhone the flash control is the small icon at the top of the camera screen, and it has to be set to off rather than auto. Android puts it in much the same place.

Then move to a window. Indirect daylight is the best light most people have and it costs nothing: a window that does not have the sun coming directly through it, or any window at all on an overcast day. Overcast is not second best here. It is ideal. Direct sun is too hard, blowing out the bright parts of the print, digging sharp shadows into anything with texture, and picking out every crease in the paper.

Watch where you are standing. If you put yourself between the window and the print, your own shadow falls across it. Set the print in the light and work from the side of it instead.

If the print is glossy, do not fight the reflection. Pick the print up and tilt it a few degrees, one way and then the other, watching the screen as you go. The bright patch slides across the surface and off the edge, and the moment it is gone you take the shot. Turning the overhead lights off helps too, both because it removes one more thing to reflect and because it stops warm bulbs and cool daylight mixing into an odd color cast.

Get square to the print

Square means the phone is flat and parallel to the print, not leaning over it. In practice that usually means standing up rather than sitting down, holding the phone directly above the center of the print with the back of the phone parallel to the table.

Then come down close. Bring the phone down until the print fills the frame, with only a thin margin of table showing around it. This is the step people skip and later regret, because cropping afterwards is not the same thing at all. A print that fills the frame uses the whole camera. The same print shot from two feet up and cropped down to a quarter of the frame keeps a quarter of the detail, and that quarter is precisely the difference between holding up on a screen and not.

Turn on the camera's gridlines if you have not already. On an iPhone it is under Settings, then Camera; on Android it lives in the camera app's own settings. Two lines each way across the viewfinder turn squareness from a feeling into something you can see: line the edges of the print up against the grid and the leaning trapezoid stops happening.

One more thing worth thirty seconds. If the print lifts easily out of a frame or an album sleeve, take it out, because glass and plastic add reflections of their own that no angle will fully remove. If it resists at all, leave it. A reflection is easier to live with than a torn corner.

Hold still

Both hands on the phone, elbows resting on the table. That alone removes most of the shake, because your arms are no longer holding anything up.

Tap the screen on the face before you shoot, not on the middle of the print. Tapping tells the camera what to focus on and what to expose for, and the face is the only part of this anyone is going to look at.

Then take three. Not one. Shots cost nothing, they take a second each, and the difference between a soft copy and a crisp one is usually just which of the three you kept.

If you want the steadiest possible version, use the timer. The press of the shutter button is itself a small nudge downward, arriving at exactly the wrong moment. Set the timer to three seconds and the phone takes the shot after your finger has left it, with nothing touching it at all.

Check one before you do a hundred

Do not copy the whole box and then find out. Copy one print, and not your best one, and check it before the setup becomes a routine. If it comes back clean, the window and the angle and the grip are right, and the rest of the box is repetition. If it does not, you have one thing to change and one print to shoot again instead of a hundred.

The tool below looks at a file the way a screen at a service will, and it does that without the photograph going anywhere. It all happens inside your browser, on the device in your hand, with no account to make.

It is looking at three things: whether there are enough pixels to fill a large screen, whether the edges are crisp or smeared, and whether a patch has been blown out to pure white. If it flags something, the fix is in one of the sections above, and it is almost always the light.

Turn the print over first

The back of a print is the one part of it nobody has ever copied, and it is often where the only real information lives. A name, a place, a year, in handwriting you recognize. Once the prints go back in the box, that goes with them.

So make it a habit before you shoot the front: flip the print, and if there is anything written there, photograph the back as its own shot. Same window, same grip. It does not have to be beautiful, only readable. Keep the two files next to each other and you will still know, in a year, which back belongs to which front.

Do not write on the print yourself, even lightly. If somebody in the house recognizes a face or remembers the summer it was taken, put it in a note on your phone or say it into a voice memo while they are still standing there. That is also the raw material for putting the whole box in order later, which is its own job: our guide to sorting hundreds of undated photos covers doing it without dates and without losing an evening.

When to use a scanner instead

A phone is the right tool for most of that box, and it is honest to say where it stops.

Use a flatbed scanner, or pay someone who has one, when:

• The print is small and you want it big. A wallet-sized print enlarged for a poster or a framed portrait needs real detail, and a scanner at a high setting will find more of it than a phone held above a table.
• The print is fragile. Brittle, cracked, curled, or stuck to an album page. Repeated handling is the risk there, and somebody who does this for a living will handle it once.
• It is going on a wall rather than a screen. Paper is far less forgiving than projection, so anything destined to be enlarged and framed deserves the better copy.

Most pharmacies with a photo counter, most print shops, and the copy desks at office-supply stores will scan a stack cheaply. Call before you drive over and ask one question: is it done here in the store, or sent away? A copy desk or an independent shop usually does it on the premises and can hand the prints back the same day, while a pharmacy photo counter frequently packs prints off to a partner lab and quotes a turnaround in weeks, which is not what you want to discover on a Saturday with a service on Tuesday. If only a handful of prints fall into that category, it is worth the errand.

For everything else, a phone at a window is not the compromise version. When time is short and the photographs are going onto a screen for a few minutes in a quiet room, it is simply the right answer, and it is one you can finish tonight.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I take a picture of an old photo without glare?

Turn the flash off first, since that one setting causes most of it. Then move the print into indirect daylight near a window instead of working under a ceiling light, and stand to the side so your own shadow does not fall across it. If a bright patch still sits on a glossy print, pick the print up and tilt it a few degrees while watching the screen, and the reflection will slide off the edge. Overhead lights off, window light on, and nothing shiny directly above the print.

Is a phone good enough to copy old photos for a slideshow?

For a slideshow, yes. A modern phone camera resolves far more detail than any screen at a service can show, so the limit is almost never the camera. It is the light, the angle, and how steady your hands were. Fill the frame with the print, keep the phone parallel to it, light it from a window, and a phone copy is indistinguishable from a scan once it is up on a screen. A scanner is still the better tool for anything you plan to enlarge and print.

What resolution do photos need for a funeral slideshow?

A 1080p screen is 1920 pixels across, so aim for at least 1920 on the long edge, and 2000 or more if you want room to crop. Below about 1200 a picture starts to look soft as soon as it is stretched to fill a screen. Any phone from the last decade clears that easily when the print fills the frame, so an undersized file is usually not a camera problem: it came through a text message or was saved off a social media post, and both of those shrink a file on the way.

Should I scan or photograph old prints?

Photograph them when time is short and the copies are going onto a screen, because a phone at a window can get you through a whole box in an evening. Scan them, or have them scanned, when the print is small and you want it large, when it is fragile or stuck to an album page, or when the picture will be printed and framed rather than projected. Most pharmacies with a photo counter and most print shops will scan a stack for you cheaply, but call ahead and ask whether it is done in the store, because a photo counter often sends prints away to a partner lab and the turnaround runs into weeks.