Guides & Articles
The Timeline Scan Blog
Practical guides for families digitizing decades of printed memories — from how to scan a shoebox without losing your weekend, to how to put thousands of photos back into chronological order, to what to actually do with the archive once you have it.
Scanning Best Practices for Family Photos
The four scanner settings that actually matter — DPI, file format, scanning the back of every print, and how to name files so an entire box stays together. A short, opinionated checklist.
Read the article → Before You ScanCommon Mistakes When Scanning Family Photos
The flip side of the checklist — twelve pitfalls that turn “I’ll just scan these” into a project that never finishes. From low DPI and dirty glass to bulk-stamping every photo with the same date.
Read the article → Right After ScanningHow to Organize Scanned Family Photos in Chronological Order
You finished scanning. Now thousands of photos sit in a folder, all stamped with today’s date and stacked in no particular order. Five steps to turn that pile of files into an archive your family can actually browse.
Read the article → Once It’s OrganizedWhat to Do After Scanning Your Family Photos
Nine concrete ways to bring scanned family photos back into daily life — living-room slideshows, printed decade books, memory interviews with elderly relatives, and gifts that make the archive matter again.
Read the article →Why We Write These
Timeline Scan exists because a single family photo project — eight thousand prints, one founder, one weekend that turned into a year — ran into every problem we now solve. These articles are the playbook we wished we’d had: how to scan without redoing it later, how to fix the chronological order without dating every photo by hand, and how to actually use the archive once it exists.
New guides go up here as we keep learning from the families using the service. If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover, write to support@timelinescan.com.
Ready to Fix Your Timeline?
If your scanned family photos are clumped at today’s date in Google Photos or Apple Photos, Timeline Scan dates them automatically — photo by photo — and writes the corrected dates straight into the metadata.
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