Welcome to Scanning.Guide!

We hope this guide will help you in your efforts of creating archival quality scans of different video game media, such as boxes, covers, manuals, and more.

Preservation of analog data is by definition a lossy process.

This guide focuses on getting high quality output from scanners and also goes over standards that are used by VGSC (Video Game Scanning Collective) for their archival scanning project.

The goal is to not cut corners, and avoid a need to re scan things in the future by getting you the best feasible scan possible with good scanning hardware NOW. Based on our research, current scanning hardware and software is fantastic for our purposes, and it’s unlikely scanning will greatly improve in the near future with regards to discernible quality. Because of this we feel it's as good a time as ever to start scanning.

If you have items you are willing to have scanned but don’t want to mess with all this, please let us know in either the Gaming Alexandria Discord or the VGPC Discord in the #scans_vgsc channel. There are people in there that will be glad to scan your items and return them to you. We’ll likely even cover the shipping charges both ways.