Replicas of Old Photos- Dublin

diddlybit

Hi all,

I'm making a memento album for my sister and I'm looking for somewhere in Dublin city centre that will replicate old photos.

My mother has given em a stack of old childhood photos, but I'll like to give them back to her, as I know she's very fond of them.

Any suggestions? Or would I be better off trying to scan and print them out myself?

AnCatDubh

I'd suggest having a go at scanning yourself.

It is relatively straightforward. Scan at 300dpi and fairly default settings after that assuming you don't need to enhance or retouch them.

Do a few and try having them printed - go to a harvey norman, DID, or somewhere like that (you'll print fairly cheap at least for testing purposes). At worst that will cost you 20c per test print (for somthing like a 6x4). Not much lost there and if it is a disaster then seek out someone that knows what they are doing. But in my experience it is entirely doable yourself.

The scan and print process are relatively easy. The other problem may be replicating the size of the original or more likely should you need to resize it. There are some odd sizes in old photographs. The thing to do here is ensure that when you print that you tell the machine (or whoever is assisting you with the machine) not to crop the images. You'll end up with white space but it will be better than an inch or two being cut off the top or bottom of a photo and then just slice off the white space of the resulting photo.

The other issue is that if you have a lot then it will be time consuming. But if you have time even if over an extended period then it is entirely doable.

Even cheap scanners these days give quite acceptable results.

The other thing (just a suggestion) if you are feeling a little more adverturous but it's not terribly difficult these days either is to take the old photos, scan them, and use photobook creation software to put them into a book. Have this printed (photobox, blurb, etc.) and present this back to your mother. I did something similar and it got a fantastic (and really emotional) reaction. This is well worth the extra effort as your mother won't have seen those photos in a book format and in preparing the book you may decide to enlarge some photos to full page format (assuming size allows) and she will see things in the photos that she never before noticed.

Hope it goes well for you.

diddlybit

Many thanks for the advice.

Scanned them all in and got them printed at a local chemist. Took a while, but they all turned out well.

The suggestion of a book is lovely, might do it as a surprise.

Thanks again!