Our History

Affordable Scans was started in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the fall of 2005 as an extension of a family archiving project by its founders. When Katrina hit we had just finished scanning in our own family photos and negatives. Our collection was made up of about 9,000 items and took more than 100 hours to scan using a collection of flatbed and film scanners. At one point we had 6 different scanners to handle different situations! What seemed like a simple weekend task at first soon turned into an incredibly frustrating ordeal.

All kinds of problems popped up. Some of the scanners worked better with some PCs. Each type of scanner software would fail in different situations... miscropping, misfeeding, misdetecting images as we went. Then organizational problems, dust effects and streaks showed up and soon we were spending more time rescanning things to fix problems as we did scanning them in the first place. The time involved caused even more anxiety by cutting heavily into family time. It became so intimidating that we stopped working on it several times.

There had to be a better way. One by one we overcame each problem. We spent a lot of time learning about things that no one else cares about. We found better equipment that delivered higher quality scans. We came up with organizational systems that eliminated errors. Our engineering instincts (the founders are electrical and computer engineers) kicked in and we came up with grand plans to do it better. Everything came together and then we were done. Nothing left to scan, but an entire summer of free time was gone.

As Hurricane Rita approached and everyone around us made their evacuation plans we decided that the only real important things in our house were our family, our photos and some important financial documents. Since our photos and documents had already been scanned in, we were able to just purchase our airline tickets and a few hours later we were headed out of town with our children and a backup copy of our pictures on a handful of DVDs. Only later did we fully appreciate the peace of mind that the summer of scanning brought to us. When we got back we found that almost universally, everyone had decided the same thing. In emergencies and in life, the most important things are your family and your memories.