I want to scan the album I made with my grandma's old photos. It is 12 X 12 and everyone says you cannot scan that size. Can I, and where?

You can check with certain blueprinting companies, but expect to pay out the *ss.

@evelyns_pet_zebra Thanks.

You can also consider buying a scanner if you are going to do a lot of scanning, but they are pricey themselves, running often about $1000. You may also need a large format printer. We had both at the museum where I used to work as we needed that ability both for exhibit production and for scanning the contents of the archives.

You might also check with local printing companies. A lot of what they do these days is all electronic and in our town several printing companies have the large format scanners as well as large format printers.

However, if you have the time and the inclination, you can scan each page four times and then “stitch” the parts of each page together to get the original layout in digital form. You can also do what I do at home – I scan the individual photos and then create a digital scrapbook through resizing, cropping, and cut-and-paste. I use a cheapo $99 Epson scanner to do that as we don’t print out the resulting album but put it on CD for anyone who needs it.

What Darwin said about cheapo scanners is true. Even the scanners that come as part of the do it all printer, copier, faxes are more than overkill for home consumer use.

You could also take a digital picture of the pages. If you set it up right, nice and flat, light it evenly, that would work to depending on what you want to use it for.

Were the photos mounted in the book permanently? Otherwise, could you just scan each image individually, and then compile them together after you have them all scanned?

@ les I did scan most of the pictures before I put them in the album, just in case, god forbid, anything ever happens to it. AND, I used photo corners for the album so the pics are removable. But, the scanned photos do not really look true to how the original photos look, and in the album I have comments about the memories the photos bring, and some history about the era and my family, so I really want the whole page.

I guess maybe I could recreate the whole thing on line, scanning all of the pictures and photoshopping (I’m not very good on photoshop)...it seems overwhelming to me.

If you take the photos to a company that makes displays and get them scanned, you can get them done at a high resolution and have them scaled down to the size that you need. The problem with how pictures look when scanned at home is that the resolution is not high enough. Since you can remove the pictures you can have the pictures gang scanned, and pay the rate for a larger scan, but get more images into it. The best way to do this is to sort pictures by color density and have them grouped together.

Sometimes you can find a local photographer who does restoration work on old photos who can get good scans for you.

OTOH, it could give a you a nice hobby for when the weather isn’t pleasant outside.

Several other reasons your copies may not be true to the originals: printer alignment, monitor color calibration (if you are correcting color), paper quality, incorrect paper type specification,or your printer may just be incapable of producing the value contrast of the originals.
Also, scanning black and white photos in color mode will give you more pleasing results.