Photographic plate archives contain a wealth of information about positions and brightness celestial objects had decades ago. Plate digitization is necessary to make this information accessible, but extracting it is a technical challenge. We develop algorithms used to extract photometry with the accuracy of better than ~0.1m in the magnitude range 130.2m) variable stars. The algorithms are implemented in the free software VaST available at
scan.sai.msu.ru 4 pages, 3 figures; proceedings of the IAU Symposium 339 Southern Horizons in Time-Domain Astronomy, 13-17 November 2017, Stellenbosch, South Africa