How to scan and preserve an old yearbook

An old yearbook is one of the few places a relative's face, full name, nickname and activities sit on the same page. If you own one, a good scan protects it and lets other family members, and the rest of the class, find it. This guide covers checking whether it is already online, handling and scanning a fragile book, storing it, and sharing it.

1. Check whether it is already online

Before you scan, spend ten minutes searching. Public libraries have digitized thousands of yearbooks, mostly through the Internet Archive. Search its text index for the school name and the year, and look at your local public library's digital collections. Here, every school page lists the yearbooks we have read, with a link to each scan: browse the directory. If your book is already online, you may only need to look for your relative on its page, and your copy becomes a backup.

More places to look

No single site has every yearbook. These are the best other starting points, and several are run by individuals or volunteers:

The Internet Archive's yearbook collection: tens of thousands of scanned yearbooks that can be searched by school and year.
The Ancestor Hunt: Kenneth Marks's state-by-state lists of free yearbooks online (this link is its Massachusetts list).
Cyndi's List: Yearbooks and Annuals: a long-running, hand-curated directory of genealogy links.
Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America: yearbooks, photographs and local histories digitized by libraries, with state-level and national search.
The USGenWeb Project: volunteer-run county websites, where a county coordinator may know of local yearbooks and where to find them.

Know a resource we missed, or run a genealogy site with yearbooks on it? Write to hello@theclassalbum.com and we will add it.

2. Handle the book gently

Work on a clean, flat, dry table. Wash and dry your hands first; conservators generally prefer clean, dry hands for paper and books, because cotton gloves reduce your feel and can snag pages. Use nitrile gloves for loose photographs.
Remove paper clips, rubber bands and sticky notes. Never use tape on a page, even to mend a tear.
Open the book only as far as it opens easily. A yearbook's spine is the weak point, so support the covers with a book cradle or two foam wedges instead of pressing the pages flat.
Photograph the cover, spine and any inscriptions or signatures too. They are part of the record.

3. Scan it

Flatbed scanner. Best quality for sound books. Scan in colour at 300 dpi for text pages and 400 to 600 dpi for portrait pages, and keep the book's weight off the lid. Large yearbooks may need each page scanned in two halves.
Phone or camera. Good enough for finding names. Shoot from directly above on a flat surface in even daylight, with no flash and no shadow from your hand, and keep the phone parallel to the page.
Fragile spines. Libraries use a V-shaped cradle that holds the book open at about 90 to 120 degrees. A foam-wedge cradle at home does the same job.

Save one high-quality master file per page (TIFF or maximum-quality JPEG) and name the files so they sort in order, for example melrose-high-1928-p014.tif. Keep a second copy somewhere else.

4. Make it searchable

Text recognition (OCR) turns the scans into searchable text. Free options include Google Drive and the open-source Tesseract. Expect trouble with names: captions are often small, italic or set in capitals, and OCR garbles them, which is why we check every name against the page image before publishing it.

5. Store the book

Keep it cool, dry and out of the light, around 65 to 70°F with relative humidity between 30 and 50 percent. Attics, basements and garages are the worst places.
Use an acid-free, lignin-free box that fits the book. Avoid PVC plastic. Polyester or polypropylene sleeves are safe for loose photographs and inserts.
Large yearbooks are best stored flat or lying on their back edge, not leaning.

6. Share it

A scan is most useful when others can find it. Ask the school, the local public library or the historical society whether they want a copy, or upload it to the Internet Archive with a free account. Yearbooks published in 1930 or earlier are in the public domain in the United States, so you can share those freely. Later ones may still be protected, so check before posting a book in full; our rights page explains how we handle it. If you have a yearbook we do not, write to us at hello@theclassalbum.com.

7. Equipment that helps

These are Amazon search links, so you can compare current models and prices. They are affiliate links: if you buy, we may earn a commission at no cost to you.

Flatbed scanners, for page-by-page scans
Book cradles and foam wedges, to support a fragile spine
Acid-free archival boxes, for storing the book
Polyester archival sleeves, for loose photographs and inserts
Magnifiers and loupes, for reading small captions
Genealogy research guides, for what to do after you find the name

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Last checked 20 October 2026.