Photo scanning service, scan old photos. scan a shoebox: scandango Blog

Jul 03 2012

Welcome the new face of Scandango!



We are exceptionally pleased to announce Samantha Sunderland (aka Sam, la Cara and sometimes 'Moog') has taken the role of Head of Social Media and Marketing and is the new 'Face of Scandango.' Sam has been working tirelessly to support Scandango operations in numerous areas and is now kindly going to be driving our social media operations.

Sam is an award winning blogger, a keen photographer, highly creative and multi lingual... Truly an asset to the Scandango team.

Please feel free to email Sam to say hello, you will be hearing a lot more from her as soon as she has finished reviewing our business and defining a strategy to move us forward and help grow the business.
el Mono
May 19 2012

We want to give you a bit of a warm feeling...

When we say a warm feeling we don't mean the same one you get when you give in to nature and relieve yourself in your wetsuit... this one is much better (incidentally we NEVER do that).

It is a sad truth that your photos are deemed monetarily worthless, even though they are of course priceless. As no courier or shipping company is prepared to offer insurance against loss of photographs we have decided we will offer our own type of insurance.

Terms and conditions apply (of course), but in essence if you choose our basic shipping and in the unlikely event the courier company we choose loses your package of photos we will give you £200. We know that amount of money will not bring your photos back but we feel it shows we take the safety of your photos seriously, that we are confident in our couriers and... that we care.
El Mono
May 18 2012

Choice holiday in NZ

Just like Britney... Oops I did it again.

I'm going to stop making wild claims that I can't possibly hope to fullfil, such as my claim that I intended to write this blog more frequently. I think my last article was in January so that idea went for a burton didn't it?

It is hard to blog sometimes, if nothing else it is difficult to edit yourself. We have met so many fantastic people through doing this business. We have hundreds of clients who tell us the most fantastic tales behind their photos; alas our commitment to customer privacy prevents us from sharing these stories with you.

Our own stories within the Scandango team seem dreadfully boring compared to the wacky world of our customers, every once in a while though something out of the ordinary does happen and when it does I will try and recount it here.

So... My mum (la Madre) and I went to New Zealand recently on holiday so she could fullfil a life goal of white water rafting in NZ before she was 60! This holiday was a holiday in a lifetime for both of us and we managed to do loads of activities in just three weeks.

Like Bob Geldoff dining out on 'I don't like Mondays' (according to the comedy rogue Russell Brand), my mum and I have been living off our memories of this trip ever since we got back.

Our lift pitch - a version of our adventure that can be told in the time it takes to take a lift somewhere - is this:

We have just come back from a three week holiday in New Zealand, it was a holiday of a lifetime! We loved it. We had a stop over in Hong Kong which we found fascinating and spent two days walking all over Kowloon Bay exploring the markets and getting lost with the locals - we need to go back here and explore it some more. Then we hit New Zealand, hired a car and went all over from the most northerly tip of the North Island to the most southerly tip of the South Island.

PING - at this point the lift has probably got to your floor, but why not live a little and go a few extra floors? Buckle in as things get crazy from here on in :)

We kayaked in mangrove forests... abseiled 100m into a massive cave system and then spent seven hours swimming in underground rivers, climbing waterfalls, squeezing through tight holes and plunging into shallow pools - terrifying but absolutely incredible experience, un paralleled by anything we have ever done... white water rafted over the highest commercially raft-able waterfall in the world... helli-hiked on a glacier, and went on a four hour kayak experience in the remote, vast and staggeringly beautiful Milford Sound.

...

We took hundreds, possibly thousands, of photos while we were there, this is the blessing of having a digital camera and the curse. It is a blessing as we were able to capture all sorts of things that we liked the look of and that mean something to us, however it does mean we have been left with a massive repository of images that will really only mean anything to us and as such until we have time to edit the photo collection down; I will upload some images on flickr for anyone who is interested.

New Zealand is breathtakingly beautiful, it is impossible to describe how naturally stunning the place is. We have been lucky to capture some amazing photos (and some terrible ones, we are not professional photographers), and whilst the photos can never, and will never be able to match the experience of seing something with your own eyes, they are a great way for us to look back at our holiday of a lifetime and have the memories flood back. Without sounding maudlin, these photos will outlive us and let our future generations know that we were there... we did that... and yes she was 60 (well 59 and 360 odd days but we weren't counting).



The above image is our group about to embark on an adventure having abseiled 100m into this cave.

I have just seen the photo of my mum and I abseiling 100m into Waitomo cave for the 7 hour Lost World epic adventure and I just experienced the same lurch in my stomach as I had to position myself on a metal bar and look down into the abyss. The same feeling of 'oh my god' and every nerve being on fire with anticipation. As with so many experiences, that was just a taster of what was to come. 

For anybody interested in going on this, check them out here:

Look at our Lost World 7 Hour Epic Adventure pictures here:

Please no comments on how much of a goon I look!

In a classic devious mum move, I have been roped in to taking her back to Waitomo before she is 75 to do the trip again! I don't mind really as I don't need an excuse to go back, the place is incredible - I just hope I'm up to it, I know my mum will be :)

Well, that's me done for now... back off holiday, energised and keen to implement some new features, deals and services on Scandango. La Boca has been working tirelessly on some exciting new ideas... I'm not going to say too much but the words 'slide scanning... it's the future!' have been uttered.

Watch this space!
Love to all.
El Mono
Jan 04 2012

Happy New Year Everybody! (but mainly Belgium)

Hi everyone, Happy New Year, everyone at Scandango hopes you will have a cracking 2012!

OK arrogant flamboyant outburst out the way... Happy New Year to the people who actually read this - and I think I can count them on one hand; the sentiment about having an amazing 2012 is true no matter what :)

Right then to business people, carpe diem and all that...

Firstly - Belgium. Why are we singling them out in this post? Well, in short we think Belgium and Belgians are awesome!

The reason for this is because after the UK, Belgium is the biggest user base of Scandango's services. This may be because we featured in a Belgian innovation magazine or it may be because the Belgians are helpless romantics, sentimental and in tune with what we at Scandango are trying to do.

We aren't in this for the big bucks – none of us are going to be driving around in DB9's. We are doing this because we love old photos and the memories that come flooding back when we look at them. We do this because we want our memories to be kept safe for future generations to enjoy, and by getting them into the digital domain it makes them more accessible; nobody is going to freak out when little Amelie has pudding all over her fingers but insists on looking at the digital photo of her daddy wearing a funny jumper and a silly moustache - worse case scenario is the iPad or similar device will need the screen wiping! Finally we do it because we have met so many great people as Scandango has begun to flourish. Your photos are more than photos to you and our customers are more than customers to us.

Wishing everyone much love and all the best for 2012.
El Mono
Dec 05 2011

I'm not saying we're sharp... but we are in Focus!

I'm a bit of a geek, I can't help it I just am. I also am addicted to cheese, it's just how I've been put together; I love cheese and I love science, history, technology... pretty much anything that gets associated with geek.

It is for this reason that last night (a Saturday night I hasten to add) that I was lying on my sofa thumbing through the latest issue of the BBC's Focus magazine looking for the article on 3D printing. Going through the magazine backwards, after drooling over the gifts and gadgets I got to the 'TechDoc' section where an article caught my eye...

'How to... DIGITISE YOUR MEMORIES' written by Spencer Kelly (journalist and presenter of Click).

In the article Spencer gives advice on how to digitise your VHS, vinyl and photos. In the photo column Spencer gives tips on home scanning - all good advice, and... he mentions us!!! < Sorry to get carried away here but I definitely feel this warrants a three exclamation mark high-five!

So, to date, we have been featured on wired.co.uk, Focus magazine, Springwise and apparently a Belgian innovation magazine (this makes us really happy as we now have lots of Belgian customers / friends of Scandango).

Where can we pop up next?

General update...

We recently skipped across the pond to visit New York and look at some new scanning technology. We still haven't decided on whether we can/should support negative scanning. Maybe I need to create a poll to gauge interest in this, we still get a lot of email enquiries regarding it – is the cause of much debate in the Scandango HQ.
El Mono

Oct 19 2011

Toy Collector mesmerizes Scandango


You may be picturing 'Al' the obsessive toy collector from Toy Story 2 hypnotizing my brother and I with shiny things (and in all honesty when I heard the name Toy Collector I pictured Al too). In reality Toy Collector is an amazing website run by a team with a passion for toys. Toy Collector is also the home of ToyPedia an impressive attempt to catalogue all toys. If you have a fascination with model cars (especially Corgi and Dinky Toys) then you need to check out the site! (Warning, true fans and aficionados will spend hours looking on the site, we may have to ration how much El Fijador goes on it as we fear he is becoming addicted!).

Toy Collector found Scandango from an article on the Wired.co.uk website, and sent us a shoebox of photos of models of cars from around the world. Normally we wouldn't blog about the content of a customer's photos as our service is confidential, but the photos were not of a personal nature and were so interesting Toy Collector kindly agreed to let us show you some of them – thank you Toy Collector and a special thank you to LaToya! There are photos of all sorts of vehicles from BMW Bubble cars through to airport fire trucks. Some of the photos show the car as a standalone model, while other photos have been fully staged with fake sets and props; the image above is a great example of this.

As a side note El Fijador has a passion for Dinky toys so he was in heaven looking at photos of them. Whilst he has an impressive collection of Dinky Toys already, we have noticed he has started to spend rather a long time looking longingly at the Dinky models in the Toy Collector marketplace (El Fijador tip: Most of the models in the marketplace are fascinating but if you type 'Dinky' in the search box you can focus just on those).







To add our own little bit of Scandango into this blog I'd like to point out that all I have done to these images is reduce the size to allow them to fit onto the page; I have not retouched the images in any way (adjust colours, brightness, dust and scratches or edited the borders). The reason I have left them 'raw' is so you can see the quality of them direct from the scanner. Ideally I would tweak them a little, if nothing else to tidy the edges a little, however the images are amazing anyway and we think they have scanned in really well.

If you want to find out more about Toy Collector click here.

Oct 05 2011

New Parcel Preparation page

Just a quickie to let you know we have now got a page of advice (courtesy of La Madre) on how to pack your photos to protect them before you send them to us. We humbly apologise if this comes across as teaching our grandmas to suck eggs (wish we had a photo of this); you wouldn't believe what sort of packages people are sending us.

Some of you are amazing at packing, you all know who you are, put down your scissors and your sticky tape and give yourselves a hearty pat on the back (seriously do put down the scissors first).


For the others of you who struggle with this bit, you may find some help here...

Parcel preparation

Cheers for now!
El Mono

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