Separate Photos from a Scrapbook Page

What this does

Scan the page the way it sits in the book, with its borders, captions and corner mounts still on it. We read the page, find each photograph on it, and cut each one into a separate image. Every one of those images then goes through the same restoration the rest of the site runs, on its own.

What comes back is the photographs, as separate files, not the page they were mounted on. If you would rather restore the page as one picture, upload it on the bulk page without the separation option.

What to send us

• PDFs are fine. Flatbed scanners default to PDF, so a scanned album very often arrives as one. Each page of the PDF becomes its own page scan, which is exactly the right shape for this.
• Images work too. JPEG, PNG, HEIC and WebP. A phone photo of a page can work, but a scan is better, because glare and a tilted angle both cost you at the cropping step.
• Up to 20 pages per order. Reading a page takes real time, so the limit sits well below the normal order size. A larger album goes out across more than one order.
• One page per scan, the whole page in frame. The prep guide covers lighting and framing. Everything in it applies here, except the part about cropping the borders out. Leave those on.

How it works

1. 1

   Scan the page

   One scan per album page, with the whole page in frame. A PDF straight from your scanner is fine. Each page of it becomes its own page scan, in your browser, before anything is uploaded.

2. 2

   We find each photograph

   Every page is read and the edge of each photograph on it is located. You see the count, and what was found, before you pay anything.

3. 3

   Each photograph is cropped out

   Every photograph becomes its own image. We cut slightly wide on purpose. A crop with a sliver of album page around it can be tidied afterwards; a crop through somebody's face cannot.

4. 4

   Each one is restored on its own

   Your chosen restoration level runs on every cropped photograph separately, so a faded snapshot beside a sharp one each get what they need. You get the separate photographs back, not the page.

What it costs

Plus $8.00 once per order, not per page.

A page is billed flat, whatever is on it. One page price covers every photograph we find on that page, up to 10. Most album pages hold about five. A page with two photographs costs the same as a page with eight, and that is the trade: you know the total before a single page has been read.

Loose photographs, with no page to separate, are priced per photo on the pricing page.

What it does not do

Worth reading before you scan, because some of these decide whether your pages are a good fit at all.

• ✗Handwritten caption cards and printed documents such as certificates are not treated as photographs and will not be separated out. If a page is mostly paperwork, this is not the right tool for it.
• ✗Black photo corner mounts stay in the cropped image. The corners sit on top of the print, so any crop tight enough to keep the whole photograph keeps them too.
• ✗A print mounted crooked keeps a little of the album page around it, unless you choose the Photo of Photo mode, which straightens the print and re-crops it.
• ✗There is no way to adjust what we found by hand. If you disagree with it, you can start the order over without the separation add-on.
• ✗A page we find no separate photographs on is restored whole, as one image, at the same price. So is a page we find more than 10 on, beyond that count.

What we have measured

We have run this over four real album pages. It found 15 photographs on them: six on the first page, one on the second, six on the third, two on the fourth. Nothing on the cream page backgrounds was mistaken for a photograph, no caption was picked up as one, and a studio portrait that filled most of a page came back as a single photograph rather than being missed.

That is the evidence we have. It is four pages, not a benchmark, so we are not going to put a percentage on it. It works well on pages like those, and when a page defeats it, the page is restored whole rather than the order failing.