Capture it once, as if you will never touch the print again
Almost every answer to this question is a table of resolution settings. The table is not wrong, and it is also not the thing that decides how your box of prints turns out, because a resolution setting is trivially easy to change and a handling decision is not.
The useful framing is that you are doing one pass over a set of objects that are older than the equipment reading them. Everything you get afterwards, every restoration, every enlargement, every colour correction, is worked out from what that pass recorded. So this page is about the pass: what the numbers actually buy you, what your phone is genuinely good at, what a flatbed is for, and the handling that is worth slowing down for.
The resolution answer, from something that had to write it down
Consumer advice on this varies wildly because nobody publishing it is accountable for the result. Archives are, so they have had to commit to a figure in writing.
United States federal regulation on digitising permanent records sets a floor for photographic prints and for paper records carrying fine detail: images must be produced at a minimum of 400 ppi sized to the source, with a note that some material needs more than the minimum. That is a preservation floor rather than an aspiration, which makes it a far more useful anchor than a blog recommendation, because it is the number below which a government has decided the copy is not good enough to stand in for the original.
Read it as a floor and not as a target. Going above it is cheap on a modern scanner, costs nothing but disk space, and buys you room to enlarge later. Going below it is the one decision on this page you genuinely cannot undo without getting the print back out of the box.
What the setting is actually buying, in one sentence
Resolution is not a quality dial. It is a budget for how much you can enlarge later, and it converts into that budget by simple arithmetic: the setting multiplied by the width of the print in inches is the number of pixels across that you end up with.
This is worth internalising because it explains why a small print needs a higher setting than a large one to arrive at the same usable file. A wallet sized photograph and a large portrait scanned at the same number produce very differently sized files, and the small one is the one that runs out of room first. If your box is mostly small prints, that is the reason to push the setting up rather than any claim about detail.
It also explains the ceiling. Past a certain point you are recording the surface of the paper rather than the image on it, which is why scans of textured prints at very high settings come back looking like they have a pattern woven through them. That pattern was always there. You simply asked a machine to see it.
Optical resolution is the real number, and it is the smaller one
Scanner specifications frequently list two figures, and only one of them is a measurement. The optical resolution is what the sensor genuinely reads. The other, variously labelled interpolated, enhanced or maximum, is the result of the software enlarging that reading afterwards.
Interpolated numbers are not a lie exactly, but they describe processing rather than capture, and processing you can always do later. Choosing a scanner or a setting on the strength of an interpolated figure means paying for something you already have. Find the optical figure in the specifications, ignore the larger one, and never set a scan above the optical number, because everything past it is invented rather than recorded.
A phone is better at this than people expect, within limits
The advice that you must own a flatbed is dated. A modern phone camera captures a great deal, it is always available, and the realistic alternative to using it is usually that the box stays in the cupboard for another decade, which is a far worse outcome than an imperfect capture.
What a phone is good at is anything you cannot flatten or cannot remove. Prints still mounted in an album, pages with handwriting around the photograph, anything glued down, anything large, anything brittle enough that peeling it up is a real risk. In those cases the phone is not the compromise, it is the correct tool, and a flatbed would mean destroying the object to use it.
What a phone is bad at is evenness. A lens looking at a flat rectangle from an angle produces a keystone, a room light produces a colour cast, and any glossy print produces a glare that lands exactly where the light source is. Those three problems are the entire difference in practice, and all three are fixable by how you set the shot up rather than by buying anything.
- Get the print flat and the camera parallel to it. Directly overhead, not leaning in at an angle. A keystone distorts every face in the frame and it is much harder to correct convincingly than it looks.
- Use indirect daylight rather than a ceiling light or a flash. A window with the print out of the direct beam gives even coverage and no hotspot. A flash on a glossy print will erase whatever is behind it.
- Fill the frame with the print and nothing else. Cropping later throws away exactly the resolution this page is about.
- Shoot at the highest quality setting your camera offers, and turn off anything that beautifies or sharpens automatically. You want the dullest, most literal capture the phone can produce, because every enhancement applied now is baked in permanently.
- Check the result at full size before moving on. Glare and softness are invisible at thumbnail size and obvious at full size, and the point of checking is that the print is still in your hand.
A flatbed is for the prints that deserve the extra minutes
Where a flatbed wins is the combination of even light, no perspective and a known scale, which together are what let a small print be enlarged convincingly later. For loose prints of a size that fits the glass, it is worth the slower pace.
The practical difficulty is that a flatbed makes everything slow enough that people give up partway through a box. A workable compromise is to sort first, put the small prints, the ones with faces you care about and anything you might want printed larger onto the glass, and photograph the rest. A finished box captured unevenly beats a perfect third of a box.
- Clean the glass before you start and check it again partway through. A speck on the glass appears in the same place in every single scan and it is maddening to remove afterwards.
- Dust the print itself with a soft brush or blower rather than a cloth. A cloth drags grit across an emulsion, which turns dust into a scratch, and a scratch is damage to the object rather than to the file.
- Handle prints by the edges. Fingerprints on an old surface are not always removable and they develop over time.
- Scan in colour even for black and white prints. A grey original carries a colour cast from age and paper, and that cast is information about the print that a greyscale scan discards permanently.
- Leave every automatic correction off. Auto colour, auto contrast, dust removal and sharpening all make a decision on your behalf that you cannot reverse, and all of them can be applied later to a copy.
Keep a master you never open again
The habit that separates a collection that survives from one that quietly degrades is keeping the capture and the edits apart. The file that came off the scanner or the camera is the master. It gets a name, it gets stored, and it never gets edited, cropped or re-saved.
Everything afterwards happens on copies. Repeatedly saving over a compressed file loses a little each time, and the loss is invisible on any single pass, which is exactly why it accumulates unnoticed across years of tidying. A master you never touch is immune to that by construction.
Name the files so that they survive you. A date, a rough description, a surname. Software that organises a library for you is convenient and it is also a dependency, and the folder of plainly named files is the thing that still opens in twenty years when the software does not.
What a good scan sets up, and where this site takes over
A careful capture does not fix a faded print, a soft face or a picture that was recorded in grey. It simply makes those fixable, because every tool that attempts them is working from what your pass recorded and cannot recover what it missed.
That is where Clara starts. It works on the image rather than on the paper: faces gone soft, files too small, flat or faded scans, and black and white that wants colour. It does not repair a tear, a crease or a missing corner, so a torn print comes back sharper and still torn, and the services comparison here covers what to do about that instead.
If the issue after scanning is size, the resolution guide explains what enlarging can and cannot recover. If it is general flatness or fading, the photo quality guide covers which problem is which, and the old photos guide is the place to start if the print has more than one thing wrong with it.
More guides
Questions
What resolution should I scan old photos at?
Treat 400 ppi as a floor rather than a target: that is the minimum United States federal regulation sets for digitising permanent photographic print records, sized to the source. Go above it where you can, especially for small prints, since the setting multiplied by the print width is simply how many pixels you end up with to enlarge from later.
Is a phone good enough for scanning old photos?
For many prints, yes, and it is clearly the right tool for anything mounted in an album or too fragile to remove. The three things that let it down are perspective, uneven light and glare, and all three are fixed by shooting flat, overhead, in indirect daylight rather than by buying different equipment.
Should I scan black and white photos in colour?
Yes. An old monochrome print carries a cast from the paper and from age, and a greyscale scan throws that information away permanently. Scanning in colour costs nothing and preserves the character of the actual object, which you can always convert afterwards on a copy.
What file should I keep as the original?
Whatever came straight off the scanner or camera, unedited and never saved over. Do every crop, correction and enhancement on a copy. Re-saving a compressed file repeatedly loses a little quality each time, and the loss is invisible on any one pass, which is why it goes unnoticed for years.
Should I turn on the automatic corrections in the scan software?
No. Auto colour, auto contrast, dust removal and sharpening each make an irreversible decision during the one pass you are doing, and every one of them can be applied afterwards to a copy. The goal of the scan is the most literal record of the print that the machine can produce.
Can scanning fix a damaged photo?
No, and it is worth separating the two kinds of damage. Softness, fading and small size live in the image and respond to processing. A tear, crease, scratch or missing corner is damage to the paper, which a scan records faithfully and Clara does not repair, so that case is covered in the services comparison on this site.