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Photo scanning: an introduction

Microform Branding - Stack of photographs.

Photo and image scanning is one of our primary offerings and we take great pride in being able to offer our clients a range of high quality scans for images of all kinds.

How the image scanning process works

As we work with businesses of all sizes and backgrounds, each project we work on is tailormade to suit the needs of the client, but there are some basic elements that remain the same throughout nearly all our work.

If a client chooses to have their images scanned on our premises (which is usually, but not always the case), we put to work our tracked and marked vehicles to ensure the total safety of the material.

The images are then delivered to our facilities and each individual piece is checked off against an inventory and sorted ready for the scanning process.

From there the images are then carefully placed in our state of the art scanners and processed through the machines at very fast rates.

Once this has taken place each image undergoes a quality check inspection and the files are once more marked against an inventory.

Depending on the needs of the client, the scans are then delivered back on a choice of technologies, including CDs, DVDs, hard-drives, pen drives or even placed on one of our bespoke document management systems.

The physical images can then be delivered with the scans or destroyed within our secure destruction facilities.

Although the vast majority of this service revolves around photo scanning, we can also scan a whole range of other types of film and photographs including:

  • 35mm slides

  • 110mm negatives

  • Half plate negatives

  • Glass plate negatives

  • Quarter plate negatives

  • Transparencies

We can also convert the scans into a choice of file types including both JPEG and TIFF.

More commonly JPEG files are used for work on computers and offer great clarity to users without taking up a lot of memory.

TIFF files are usually used within publishing industries as well as professional photographers and graphic designers. They do however take up a lot of memory and companies would require vast amounts of storage in order to accommodate for them.

Benefits of image and photograph scanning

As you can imagine, there are a whole range of advantages to the scanning of files, slides, films, and photographs.

Secure backups

If you happen to choose one of our cloud service platforms, it means that your scans are backed up on the cloud and are saved in a secure digital location.

This means that even if a whole network of computers crash or happen to be wiped, the files will still be safe on the cloud platform.

Ability to share

If your company happens to be public facing, this means that you are able to supply photographs and documents to clients in a considerably shorter amount of time.

It also means that images are able to be placed on social media accounts and websites with a great level of ease.

Greater levels of efficiency

For companies with large archives, it means that images can be located within a matter of moments.

While in the scanning process each image is sorted and filed by signifiers which means that any single image is instantly searchable.

Trusted services

We have worked with a range of businesses, from financial to medical, which means that the vast majority of work that comes through our doors is entirely confidential.

We also follow a range of British Standards and accreditations that are in line with best practice:

  • BS ISO/IEC 27001:2013 – Information Security Management System

  • BS EN ISO 9001:2008 – Quality Management System

  • BS EN ISO 14001:2004 – Environmental Management System

  • BS 10008:2008 – Evidential weight and legal admissibility of electronic information*

  • BS 6313:2003 – 35 mm microfilming of serials.

  • BS 1153:1992 – Recommendations for processing and storage of silver-gelatine-type microfilm

  • S ISO 4087:2005 – Micrographics. Microfilming of newspapers for archival purposes on 35 mm microfilm

For more information on image scanning, contact us on (0)1924 825 700.