By Cody, founder of Silver Frame Archives. Price guide, updated 5 July 2026. We publish our full price list, so this guide includes our own rates alongside the market's.
In Sydney in 2026, professional photo scanning costs between roughly $0.30 and $1.50 per photo. The spread comes down to one thing: how your photographs are handled. Bulk courier services feed loose prints through high-speed machines at the low end; in-person services that inventory, hand-check and colour-correct each photo sit at the top. Here is the whole picture, with real numbers.
Minimum job fee $40. Volume tiers apply automatically. Full details on the photo scanning page.
Handling. The single biggest factor. Machine-fed bulk scanning is cheap because nobody looks at your photos individually; it also cannot take fragile, curled or album-bound prints.
Albums. Sticky and magnetic albums from the 70s and 80s often cannot be emptied safely, so pages are scanned in place, which takes longer.
Resolution. 300 DPI suits sharing; 600 DPI suits reprinting and restoration later.
Slides and negatives are a different process with different pricing, from $0.90 each. See slide and negative digitisation.
Damaged photos can be scanned as they are, then repaired individually. That is restoration, quoted separately after a free assessment.
Cull duplicates and blurry frames before you hand the box over; you pay per photo, so a ruthless half hour saves real money. Group everything into one job to reach the volume tiers rather than splitting across months. And if your collection is thousands of identical machine prints in good condition and you are comfortable posting them away, a bulk courier service is legitimately the cheaper tool. Where the collection is irreplaceable, mixed, fragile or album-bound, in-person handling is what you are actually paying for.
Ours is $40. Most services have one, published or not.
With us, light colour correction is included at every tier. Bulk services usually charge extra or skip it.
Paper is quoted like photo scanning when undamaged; faded or damaged documents fall under document restoration.
Want an exact number instead of a range? Get a free quote or see the full price list.