Photo Scanning - What To Look Out For When Using a Bulk Photo Scanning Service

So for whatever reason you may have you're looking at outsourcing your photographs to be scanned and converted to digital. This could be because your company would like all original photographs scanned and indexed so they can be disposed of to save space, you want to complete a project which requires the photos to be digital, or you would like them converted so they can be used in publications, then outsourcing has probably come to your mind for scanning a larger quantity of photographs.

Most bulk document scanning companies will offer a photo scanning service and you should search for a reputable one of those, but what should you look out for so you don't get bad results or worse still the original photos become damaged or ruined?

There are a number of things you can do to try to avoid this, some common sense and we also offer some tips and advice for you to try out too.

When you contact the company, which I would do by phone to get a better feel for who you're going to be dealing with, ask questions about the service such as 'What quality do you scan at?' 'Would you recommend my photos be scanned in colour or black and white?' 'How long will the process take?' and 'What does the photo scanning process involve?'. If they give you detailed answers to these questions and even a little more information about it a little further away from your question, this is always a good sign that the person there knows what they're talking about. In the instance of the colour or black and white question, they should also offer you greyscale as a further option, which is a higher quality version of a black and white image for example.

Also, ask the company about their accreditation. Certification such as the ISO 9001:2000 are always a good sign as this means that their work is evaluated by a third party to ensure quality, but if they have qualifications further along than this, it's a good sign, but make sure to check them out to ensure that they aren't simply trying to make themselves look more impressive. If they lie about something like this, it's more than likely they don't have a very good sense of business.

Another tip is to visit the place where the work is done if possible so you can witness for yourself the process going on. Don't think that this is rude or too forward; they should welcome you with open arms if they are a reputable company who are confident in what they do.

Possibly most important of all is getting a small sample of work completed for you. Again the company should be happy to assist with this and scan and index the files for you, which shouldn't take long at all. If this take more than a few days to complete then it's not exactly professional. You could argue that they are very busy, but if they can't complete a couple of photos for you as examples with the possibility of more work, then they aren't worth bothering to pursue.

When you receive the files back, check them for their image quality, colour and make sure they aren't grainy. Obviously if the original image is grainy or distorted in any way, there is nothing that the company can do about that, but have a really good look at the quality of the scans by viewing the high quality images at 100% in your image viewer software.

That might sound like a lot to keep your eye out for, but it's definitely worth it if you are planning on having a bulk photo scanning service done. As we always say, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Steve Wright is marketing manager for Pearl Scan Solutions, a document scanning and photo scanning company based in the UK. We have been in business for nearly a decade now and have completed work for the likes of the NHS, Sky TV and the BBC and our photo scanning service is second to none with the most up to date and high quality scanners in use.

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Document Scanning Services - Five Reasons Why You Must Hire A Document Management Company

There a five main reasons why you must hire a document management company and use the best document scanning service in your business if you are still saving most of your customer information on paper or on microfilm and other plastic media.

In this short article we will discuss the financial reasons, and the reasons having to do with information processing, the ease and quality of document retrieval, document conversion, storage, and re-storage.

By the time you are done reading you should have a good idea whether these reasons are sufficient for you to start looking really seriously into document scanning services and records conversion services offers.

Financial reason number one for hiring the right scanning service

Ultimately, all reasons for introducing new services in your business have to do with improving the financial health of your enterprise. Here we will only touch on the reasons that will instantly and directly affect your bottom line.

The first financial reason to hire record scanning company is that you will reduce your cost of paper information storage. Especially if your business is located in the expensive part of town where the rents are high, your document storage will end up costing you more as your business matures. This goes against the notion that the business should be more profitable in time! Transferring the information into an electronic form will reduce storage costs, and remove paper storage costs if you decide to shred the paper versions. Or, at the very least, you can ship them somewhere where the storage costs are much lower.

Financial reason number two: retrieval and restocking of documents

The second direct financial reason for using document scanning systems is that documents scanning will reduce the time it takes to retrieve the information once is needed again, as well as reduce the time to restock the information. If everything is done right, and you have a person at $10 / hour (example) to do just that, and if it takes them 1/2 hour to find the document and 1/2 hour to re-stock the document, you would be saving $10 by just a single query into your electronic data management system.

Ease and quality of retrieval

With the electronic document management system which includes optical character recognition, OCR scanning you do not have to be limited to a single storage system, such as storing information by client name, or by property address. Through advanced indexing of all textual data, and through advanced annotation of image and time series data, searching for documents and document retrieval becomes easy and more natural, as well as ultimately more effective. You will be able to get more relevant data in a shorter amount of time. This will positively influence your bottom line.

Ease of storage

Since there is no paperwork, the storage of information becomes easy. Even when there is paper involved, it will immediately be scanned into the electronic document management system, annotated appropriately, and the paper version will either be destroyed or eventually shipped to an inexpensive storage location.

Ease of re-storage

Has it occurred to you that copying of electronic documents is almost seamless while making paper copies creates more clutter and chaos?

Another difference stemming from this wonderful feature is that electronic data never need to be restocked or re-stored after use. They are simply copied to the computer where you need them, and kept there for the time that you need them there. This is in sharp contrast with paper files, which have to be carried in and out of storage space, at a substantial cost in time and money.

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Document Scanning Company - What to Expect and How Much They May Charge

Document scanning is becoming an increasingly used service that people are outsourcing in bulk. This is for a number of reasons such as the wish that the office will become paperless, be more environmentally friendly or just to improve time-keeping, or efficiency.

These are all valid reasons, but if you were opting to use a document scanning company to scan your documents in bulk you may be wondering what to expect. As someone who has been in the business for a number of years now, it is one of the clients biggest curiosities to know about what the process is. The idea of this article is to answer that question to an extent.

Firstly it can depend on the type of document you are asking to be scanned and digitised. It could be a standard A4 document or it could be a huge blueprint for easy access and each has their own individual process. For example, a standard A4 sheet would be scanned using an industrial strength scanner which can take in hundreds of documents per minute, making sure they are the correct way up before scanning them at the quality of your request. This can be colour, black or white or greyscale. Colour kind of speaks for itself, as does black or white but grayscale is a higher quality version of black or white with more detail. You should get a sample of your documents produced before you get the lot converted as this will give you a good idea of what type of scanning you should opt for.

As this is going on the documents are being observed by a member of staff to ensure there are no problems, that no damage comes to the documents as they are going through the feed and also that the images are coming out right. The files are being saved whilst the process is going on and will be saved in order of your choice, which can be by name, reference number, title or something else. If it's possible you can also ask that the document be named after a particular field on the sheet of paper, which could be a reference number or date. This will ensure that the files are easier to find once they are on your computer system.

The documents are officially saved in a format of your choice which can range from PDF, JPEG, TIFF and other mainstream formats. These are recommended as they will be accessible by most computers around the world.

They will then be placed on a disk and sent back to you along with your physical documents if you choose to get them back, or you can alternatively have them disposed of usually by a shredding service offered by the same company. This adds space saving to the deal.

When it comes to charging you this is always a tricky subject for the company to scan documents, as it is often a very precise art to come up with a quote, one that usually requires finding out additional details about quantities and such. Very large orders of thousands of document may be as little as 1p which is a ridiculously good price. This is because of how quickly the company can scan the documents which of course passes the saving on to you. However additional services such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition, a way to make your documents text searchable) and indexing will cost extra, but will still be excellent value.

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