Kern does warn that, because of their feeding mechanism, these scanners may not work well if you’re working with old, worn photos: “If the prints are wrinkled from age, you’ll have some trouble, and you’ll need a flatbed scanner, which is a lot more time-consuming.”įlatbed scanners take up more desk space, and they’re more time-consuming, as they require you to manually place each photo on the scanner. They may be limited to smaller print sizes, such as four by six inches, but each photo can be scanned in about two seconds, and you don’t need to feed each one into the machine individually.

“You can sit there while you’re eating popcorn and pop the photos in,” Kern says. Some scanners, usually those that stand upright, have a bulk-scanning feature that lets you drop a stack of photos into it and let the machine handle the rest. Kern says, above all else, you’ll want a scanner that can handle more than one photo at a time if you’re dealing with a large stack of old photos. The main thing to consider before picking a scanner is figuring out just how many photos you need to scan and how much free time you have to get it all done.

Photo and document scanner for mac