My name is Mike McGibney, and I started The Scanning Room from a deep personal desire to preserve my family’s memories captured through photography.
Like so many families, our loft and garage was a dumping ground for suitcases and boxes full of old photographs, slides and negatives.
Some of ours went back over half a century, and encompassed photos, negatives and slides.
I had made some feeble attempts at photographing old pictures using my smartphone but quickly realised that the quality wasn’t great and there was no real organisation to it.
It gave me the idea to start The Scanning Room. It occured to me that this must be a problem on the minds of families all over. What to do with all these old photographs, negatives or slides? I wanted to offer a service to scan your old media, to save it for future generations and to give you the chance to actually use these precious pictures. We all need photographs for birthdays, weddings and sadly, funerals. I’ve had the unfortunate but important personal experience of organising photo tributes for three funerals - and if I’d had a digitised photographic record at my disposal, these jobs would have been incalculably easier.
So I decided to invest in professional equipment to scan, enhance and organise my family’s history through photographs.
I was amazed at the results.
Photos of my parents - long before I arrived - which had been discoloured and damaged were suddenly vibrant and strikingly immediate. Previously indecipherable slides could now be viewed and enjoyed. Pictures of family members, holidays and locations that I had never seen before were suddenly rendered in high quality digital files, and I was able to instantly share them with my family in England, Northern Ireland, Canada, USA and Australia.
