I have a load of old photos I’d like to scan, but find playing around with my scanner quite annoying. Is there a better way to scan my photos in?

Keeping your photos on your computer is a good way to store them in a format where they can be searched through and shared with other people. Transferring digital photos is relatively trivial, just plug in your camera and you can move your photos over at the touch of a button. Transferring your photo is another matter though.

Converting your photos into a format your computer can recognise is called digitisation, as you’re turning an image into binary data that your computer can store. There are a variety of ways of doing this, the most common involving a scanner; but you need to keep adjusting photos and cropping them to the right size. However, there’s a gadget you can use that’s designed just for this purpose. The Hammacher Schlemmer Photograph Converter is a specialised scanner that’s designed just for photos. You slot your photos in, press a button and you’re all done. Time to switch to the next photo. It’s currently on sale at Buy.com, where you can pick one up for around $80. Here’s what it looks like:

If you have lots of photos to scan, this sort of device can save you loads of time; however, even if you scan the occasional photo, it’s useful to have something that can do it at the touch of one button.