Electronic Stamp Albums

One of my ideas for my uncle's stamp collection is to pick a bunch, scan them and then use something like SnapFish to create a poster and give copies to all nieces and nephews for Christmas. I did this with my father-in-law's WW II memorabilia and everyone loved it. Any advice as to how to go about it with stamps?

 

I assume the collection is mounted in albums? Obviously that creates some challenges scanning unless you can easily (and safely) remove the ones you want. If you can, I would use a clear pocketed sleeve to batch scan them. As long as the platen on your scanner is nice and clean, this will give you a good white background around the scanned stamps. You can then use something like Adobe Photoshop Elements to crop each stamp to an individual photo to upload to the service you want to use.

Modern US stamps are copyrighted by the USPS. I don't know but online printing services may give you some trouble over this issue. Especially if the stamps you scan are mint. May not be an issue but just thought it might be worth thinking about. Don't want the Secret Service to think your counterfeiting stamps...

By the way, that is a great idea! I think I may do this with some of my collection and display the framed prints in my study. For my business I have a large format printer so I can print virtually any size poster I would want!

 

http://www.secretservice.gov/money_illustrations.shtml

 

Thank you! You guys know everything!

 

If you make a poster, then surely you have gone back to paper?