Digitizing Documents
In this day and age, it’s very easy to keep everything online. You can get your water bill online, you get sent photos from family online, you do your banking online and make phone calls online, but what about the things that aren’t online? How can you preserve them, or send them to people who need them?
The first thing that may spring to mind is to take a photo of it with your camera or phone, but this has some drawbacks that can really make it go awry.
1. The lighting will be strange, as you’re stooped over the document casting a shadow over it making it difficult to read or see.
2. The angle of the camera will distort the picture, making text appear wavy, or details in photographs may be in the wrong place.
The best answer is to use a scanner. These are built in to near enough every printer in the world and it can take high quality copies of your photos, documents, or business cards. They are designed for exactly this purpose and create a perfectly flat, uniformly lit, high quality image.
If you’re saving some photographs so they do not fade or get damaged over time and you want the highest quality available, they can be re-printed and renewed as the first day you got them.
If you send your business card to a company so that they can design an advert to go into a local magazine, having that high quality crisp image can make life a lot easier for both them and you and you won’t have to answer the question, “The email is blurry, what does it say?”
To do a scan, place the document or photo you would like to digitize into the scanner, face down against the glass. Then on your device, open the Printer manufacturer’s App and select ‘Scan’. You will end up with a file that you can then save, or send onwards. Exactly where that file is varies on the device used, although it does tell you when it finishes the scan.
When sending documents or photos you have scanned, the best way is by email as it keeps that high quality. Many people try to send images by WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, but those services automatically lower the quality, making it a pointless exercise.
Important
If you are digitizing your beloved photos, don’t forget to back them up safely. Digitizing documents makes keeping them safe a breeze, so take advantage of that and put them also onto a USB memory stick so they don’t vanish in the event of a computer problem.