Your Questions, Answered.

No. A rough guess is fine. We count and check the items you send, then calculate your final price. When your order is ready, we email your cost breakdown: blank tapes aren’t charged, and any overpayment is refunded.

If you’d rather not count at all, choose “Rather not count?” on the order page and pay £25. We sort and count your collection and prepare a scanning quote, which you approve before we scan. If you go ahead, the £25 is deducted from your scanning bill. If you decline after we’ve completed the sorting and counting, the £25 covers that work and we return your collection. If you cancel before we have finished sorting and counting, you pay a proportionate amount for the work already done and we refund the rest of the £25. Postage is charged separately, under our postage rules.

You don’t need to play your tapes before sending them. If a tape is blank, damaged or unreadable, and we can’t provide a recording you can watch, the tape itself costs £0. That includes the transfer, any 1080p upgrade, and any cleaning or repair work we carried out on it.

Quantity discounts are based on the tapes we successfully transfer. For example, if you send five tapes and we can transfer four, you pay for four at the standard rate and the five-tape discount doesn’t apply. Postage is shown and charged separately. See the tape page for details.

We guide you through your order from start to finish, at no extra cost. While your order is with us, you can WhatsApp, call or email us to ask what to send and how to pack it, check prices before you pay, find out how your order is getting on, or get help downloading your photos. If we scan something crooked, crop it wrongly or miss it, we redo it at no charge. Our help covers your order. It doesn’t include changing the pictures themselves: we don’t repair tears, stains or missing corners, or edit photos by hand.

That’s fine. Send it as it is. We’ll sort and identify everything, and we’ll ask you before doing anything that isn’t on our price list.

Yes. Every order is handled in our own studio, from opening your box to packing it back up, and we email you the day your box arrives to say it’s safe. How we look after your originals.

Yes, you pay for your order in full when you order. We then count and check everything you send. If your final bill comes to less, we refund the difference. How payment works

Yes. Every scanning order includes a slideshow video of up to 20 images chosen by us from your scans, and a digital picture index showing small previews. This applies to other film sizes too.

Yes. We always ask before cutting film, removing firmly stuck photos or doing anything that could physically change an original. How we handle price changes

Yes. Send 5 or more video tapes and you save 5%, 10 or more saves 10%, and 20 or more saves 15%. Photos, slides and negative images are counted together: 100 or more saves 5%, 500 or more saves 10%, and 1,000 or more saves 15%. The saving comes off your order automatically, with no code to enter. If you’re not sure how many you have, just send them all and we’ll count them. See all our prices.

Small orders are very welcome. There’s a minimum charge of £25 for scanning-only orders (before postage), so if your scanning comes to less than that, we’ll charge £25. Tape conversion has no minimum — one tape is £14.99. If your order mixes tapes with photos, slides or negatives, there’s no minimum at all: you pay the actual total.

Any sturdy box will do. Use our prepaid postage option, arrange your own tracked postage, or drop off by appointment. Under £50, a Small box (under 2kg) costs £3.99 for the label to our studio and £3.99 for tracked return. A Large box (mixed media, up to 20kg) costs £6.99 each way. From £50, return postage is free. From £100, postage is free both ways. If you arrange your own postage, there is no label charge. Packing guide and postage details

Our current processing time is 5–7 working days from when your items arrive at our studio. You’ll see your ready-by date in the basket before you pay, and when we’re busy we update the times on this site straight away. Please allow additional time for return delivery. The day your parcel arrives, we email you to confirm it’s safe and repeat the current processing time. If we expect your order to take longer, we’ll explain why and give an updated estimate where we can, and we’ll email you if an estimate changes.

Need it sooner? Contact us for availability and a quote for rush service. We only accept rush work once we have confirmed capacity, price and completion time with you. For anything more urgent, WhatsApp us and we’ll tell you honestly whether it’s possible.

Every photo is wiped clean before scanning and comes back with automatic colour correction, straightened and cropped. You get a finished JPEG of every image, ready for your phone, TV and sharing, and each box or bundle comes back as its own named folder, dated from your labels. JPEG + TIFF (both versions) is an optional extra, 10p extra per image on top of the scanning price. Every order also includes a private download page. See everything that’s included on our prices page.

No need to sort out matching prints. Send us your photos, slides and negatives together—we’ll check for matching pictures as we scan. If a printed photo is a copy of a slide or negative you’ve also sent for scanning, we flag it, scan that print and don’t charge for it. The normal scanning price applies to the slide or negative.

We transfer VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, Hi8, Video8 and Digital8 home video tapes: see our video tapes page. We only take on what we copy here ourselves, to our own standard, and we never send customers’ items to another company. Cine film and MiniDV are coming soon. We don’t copy audio cassettes, music CDs or shop-bought DVDs. We do copy home and wedding DVDs and the small camcorder discs to digital files, and videos from memory cards, old phones and camcorders: see our prices.

No, and nobody can honestly make a VHS tape into true HD, because that detail was never recorded on the tape. We capture every tape at the best quality it holds, at 25 frames a second, with picture and sound clean-up and chapters. Watching on a big TV? Choose the big-screen version (1080p) for £2.99 extra per tape. It won’t add detail, but it looks a little smoother on a large screen.

No. AI tools invent detail that was never on your tape, and they can change how people’s faces look. We’d rather give you your memories exactly as they were recorded. Every tape gets our gentle clean, with nothing added.

Older video tapes were recorded in a squarer shape than modern screens. We preserve each recording’s original picture proportions, so nobody looks stretched.

Your price includes up to four hours of recording per tape. Longer recordings, such as a tape recorded on long play, are £2.50 for each extra 30 minutes, and any part of a 30-minute period is rounded up to the next full 30 minutes. You don’t need to work it out. We time every tape as we transfer it and calculate the extra charge from the recorded running time, rounded up to the next 30 minutes. If any run long, the extra is on your ‘Your memories are ready’ email with a secure link to pay.

We check every tape when it arrives. A mouldy tape is cleaned before we transfer it, and a snapped tape is repaired, completely for free. If a tape can’t be saved, there’s no charge for it. If you can see mould, bag those tapes separately from everything else, as it can spread.

You can cancel for a full refund at any time before we start work on your order. The one exception is the £25 “Rather not count?” counting service: if you’ve asked us to start it and we’ve begun sorting and counting, you pay a proportionate amount for that work and we refund the rest, and return postage is included on that route. For other orders, if your parcel has already arrived, we explain the return postage cost (£3.99 for a Small box or £6.99 for a Large box) and agree it with you before anything is sent back, or you can collect your items in person at no charge. Once we’ve started, you pay for the work done and we refund the rest. If the final bill comes to more than you paid at checkout and money’s tight, just message us and we’ll sort something out. We keep your originals safe until it’s settled.

No charge for blank frames. They’re listed on your invoice so you can see exactly what you’ve paid for. Duplicate slides or negatives are scanned and charged like any other frame, as you may want both. A duplicate print of a picture you’ve also sent as a negative or slide is free (see below).

A TIFF is a full-quality copy of your picture. Your JPEG is the smaller, finished everyday copy you’ll use on your phone, TV or for sharing.

Every order includes the JPEGs, and most people only need those. JPEG + TIFF is an optional extra, 10p extra per image on top of the scanning price, and you receive both versions (so a slide at 59p with a TIFF costs 69p): a full-quality TIFF of every picture, for big prints or editing, as a separate download alongside your JPEGs. If you add them, keep them somewhere safe for the future, such as a computer, an external drive or cloud storage.

They are the same finished pictures as your JPEGs, saved at full quality without compression. You can choose a standard TIFF (8 bits per colour) for any photo, slide or negative, or a high-detail TIFF (16 bits per colour) for slides and negatives, at the same price. High-detail files are very large, about 100 MB each, so we suggest a USB stick. Not sure? Choose standard.

Want the technical detail? Read our JPEG vs TIFF guide.

A few extras we’re asked for:

• Writing on the back of loose photos (names, dates or notes) scanned free whenever there is any; blank backs are skipped
• Glass-mounted slides £1 each. We take each slide out of its glass mount, scan it, then put it back.
• All other film sizes, such as 110, 120 and 127 negatives or slides: £1 a frame. Just pop them in the box with the rest.

No. Nothing you send us goes to an AI company. Every scan is colour corrected automatically, on our own computers.

Yes. Every box or bundle you send comes back as its own folder, and the photos inside are numbered in the order you kept them. Write a year and a name on each bundle and we’ll use it in the folder and file names, included in the price, for example ‘1980 Kew Gardens 001’. We also set each photo’s date to that year, so your photos appear in the right year in Google Photos and Apple Photos. We name and date photos by group, not one by one.

Drop them off in Kenton, Harrow HA3, by appointment, so there’s no waiting for the post. Our current processing time is 5–7 working days from when your items arrive at our studio. Need it sooner? Contact us for rush-service availability and a quote. For anything more urgent, WhatsApp us.

Yes, if you’re local to us in North West London. There’s no charge to drop off in Kenton, Harrow HA3: choose it when you order, then book a day and time online. We email you a confirmation with the address. You get a receipt when you hand your items over. Further away? Use our prepaid postage option or arrange your own tracked postage. Call us on 020 8138 9493 or send a WhatsApp if you’d like to talk it through.

Return postage is free on orders of £50 or more; under £50 it is £3.99 for a Small box or £6.99 for a Large box. Your originals come back by Royal Mail, tracked. We send your originals back in the box you sent them in, with fresh tape and padding. If it isn’t strong enough for the trip home, we use a new sturdy box.

Thankfully it’s rare, but it’s worth knowing that Royal Mail compensation only covers the replacement value of the physical items, not their sentimental value. No amount of cover can replace a one-off family photo. For the most precious collections, you may prefer to drop them off in person, by appointment.

If a parcel sent with a Royal Mail label we emailed you is lost on the way to us, we refund anything you’ve paid us for that order, make the Royal Mail claim for you and pass on everything they pay. If anything is lost on its way back to you, we make the claim for you and pass on everything they pay. Your scans are separate from your parcel, so a lost parcel does not affect photos and videos you have already downloaded. Please download your photos and videos within your 30 days.

We don’t scan albums. If you’d like the photos in an album digitised, take them out and send them as loose prints, at 28p each. Photos that are stuck down should stay in the album, as removing them can cause damage.

Photos that are thick, mounted on card, in frames, badly curled or Polaroids can’t go through our photo scanner, so we scan them one at a time on our flatbed scanner instead, which is gentler on them. Flatbed scanning is 55p a photo. If a lot of your order needs this, we’ll check with you before going ahead.

We’ll tell you before doing anything. We never force, cut or wash anything without your say-so, and we never charge for an item we can’t safely scan. Everything comes back to you.

If you can see mould, please send us a photo before posting it, and bag those items separately from everything else, as mould can spread to other photos. If items are actively mouldy, we may need to return them unscanned rather than risk other customers' photos and our equipment. We’ll always tell you first.

No. We scan every photo at the best quality we can, but we don’t repair tears, scratches or missing corners. Every photo is wiped clean before scanning, and colour slides and negatives also get infrared dust removal. Some marks will always remain.

Please bear in mind a scan can only be as good as the original. If a photo was blurry, under-exposed or badly faded to begin with, the scan will show that too. A few slides may come back a slightly different shape: where the film sits crooked in its mount, we crop to the actual picture so you don’t see the edge of the mount.

Every scan is colour-corrected automatically. Because photos are corrected in bulk, colour and brightness won’t be perfect on every single photo, especially very faded or damaged ones. We don’t repair damage, but every photo is scanned at the best quality we can.

Yes. Every scan gets automatic colour correction, which brings back most faded colours. We check every scan before it comes to you.

We don’t adjust each photo by hand, as that would add a lot to the price.

When your order is ready, we email you the link to your own private SilverFrame download page. You can look through every photo online and download them all in one go. Photos come as high-quality JPEG files that can be viewed on compatible phones, tablets and computers, and you can add full-quality TIFF files for 10p a picture. If you’d rather have your photos transferred to a USB stick as well, add one for £9.99 (a Premium Kingston 64GB USB 3.2 Stick; a USB socket alone isn’t enough for a TV to play your files, so please check your TV’s manual). Our step-by-step guide shows how to add your scans to Google Photos or Apple Photos.

Your private download page stays open for 30 days, and downloading is included. When it closes, your photos and videos are deleted from our system, so please save everything you want to keep. We’ll email you 7 days before it closes. Extended storage must be arranged before your photos and videos are deleted. Files already deleted cannot be restored. Ask us at any time and we’ll delete them sooner.

Would you rather we kept them online for you? You can keep your download page open for longer and share the link with family: before your 30 days end we email you a price for a year, based on how big your files are, and you can renew at the end. If we ever stop offering this, we’ll give you at least 3 months' notice and send your photos on a USB stick, free.

For a handful of photos, a phone scanning app is fine. For more than a few dozen, or for slides and negatives, a scanning service is quicker and gives far better results: proper scanners, colour correction, dust and specks cleaned up, and your files named and organised for you. Our guide How to scan old family photos compares the options.