I've started the immense project of digitizing a literal century's worth of family photos. I'm noticing something interesting: scans of the newer photos, from maybe the 1990s & later, are *awful*: the color is off & the contrast is a nightmare. They all scan dark & garish, requiring some adjustment before saving.

But the older photos, from the 1970s & earlier, scan beautifully. Details are picked up clearly, the color is pretty good, lighting & contrast need little if any adjustment. The black & whites are exceptionally crisp.

Same scanner, same settings. I'm not sure what the difference is.

I do note that paper surface is different for all of them, depending on what photo tech was available at the time the images were taken, & how they were developed. Some are on matte paper, some have a gloss finish, for instance.

& I know from having grown up since the 70s that different cameras produced different quality results - & then there's variables like the photographer, & who developed the images - stuff like, did the photographer know about things like shutter speed & exposure? Did the developer over- or underdevelop the original negative?

Speaking of, the negatives are gone, I have no idea where they went.

I know that before they moved out of their house in the city my parents did a massive purge of slides & negatives - I have no idea what they got rid of. I still have literally thousands of photos to scan, yet I also wonder what's missing.

@Impious_Jade

The major contributor of photo quality is the film. And the development process it was designed for. There was a major shift in the early 70's. In both, Film and development.

This is mostly due to so called "rapid printing". Remember the 4 hour photo ads?
The only way to do this was with the new films and development techniques.

One thing that might help, is to sort all the photos by year, before scanning. That way your scanner settings won't have to change as frequently.

@corlin @corlin I wondered if it had something to do with development processes of the times. Good call re: sorting by year - best I can probably do is by decade, as the majority of the images aren't marked with the date. I'm going by clues a lot of the time: age of people in the image, paper texture, size of the print, etc...