I have a whole bunch of old family photos from the 80s and 90s (printed out at Walgreen’s or CVS from disposable cameras) and I want to make copies of them-- is it possible to do this and have them come out in the same type of physical form as the originals (i.e., like photos, not flimsy paper)? Do the pharmacies do this service? I also could potentially scan them (though this would be a little annoying) if that would open up more possibilities.
What are my options here?
Nearly every drug store I’ve walked into now has a Kodak scanning machine where you can scan, edit, and print photos on true photo paper.
I do it at home.
Cool, thanks. Is it very expensive?
Not usually. It varies by what you want but they usualy run about 19 cents a print to 40 cents or so but YMMV.
Do you have the negatives, or just the prints? If you have negs you just send them in for reprints. That will give the best quality.
You can scan them or have them scanned as has been suggested, although slightly lossy compared to printing from negs. The printing process a photo shop will use is better in terms of durability than an ink-jet printer. The prints aren’t particularly expensive.
FYI: Most labs today will scan the negatives, and make a digital print from the resulting jpeg.
Unless you go to a custom pro lab, it’ll be tough finding someone to do optical photo printing these days.