How Quickly You Could Scan Your Entire Photo Collection — What I Discovered From My First Week of Scanning
So you have a closet with boxes full of old prints and slides that you are dying to have scanned and neatly organized on your computer.
The problem is, you're worried about them either costing you way too much money to send to a scanning service, or taking too much of your precious free time to scan them yourself on a flatbed scanner.
Does this sound EXACTLY like your dilemma?
I'd like to share with you my experience back scanning photos for the first week.
If you want to make scanning your own photos fit into your busy and hectic life, I think my experience here might give you an idea how much time will be involved and how many photos you can easily get through.
But really quickly, here's a little back story to why I decided to scan my collection myself.
A Big Reason Why I Chose Scanning Myself vs. a Scanning Service
My wife and I spent hours over a couple weeks counting all of my family's photos and we came up with a total — a whopping total! We came up with 3,508 prints and 5,805 slides for a grand total of 9,313 photographs!
And that's not all of them.That's just the ones I have managed to bring back from my parents' house so far. But, it's the lions share.
Before I created this website, I was very close to having ScanCafe scan them all. Considering how much work is involved, they are very affordable and could produce the results I was looking for. But, because I admit I have fairly “advanced goals” for my collection, once I started adding up the extra costs to have them all scanned at high resolutions and saved as “raw” uncompressed TIFF files, the price started reaching upwards of about $.75 (US) per photo. That means my entire collection scanned would cost me — ball park number here — about $7,000.00 (US).
With a collection as large as mine, for me, when answering that whole “which is more important to you?” question, money easily trumped time.
But the problem is, when you are presented with a challenge so big as to personally hand-scan 9,000+ photos, it's really easy to put it off. In fact, I managed to put it off for 8 years. And I knew I probably couldn't afford to throw large chunks of time at it very often — like entire weekends.
If this sounds like your situation as well, let me now walk you through another more realistic option.
I Finally Challenged Myself With a Very Aggressive Goal
It occurred to me the only way I would ever get through my massive collection would be to consistently work at it a little bit at a time. So just recently, I set a goal for myself to scan a small batch of photos every day. That's 7 days a week — no days off, not even one unless I was out of town.
It had to become part of my life, like brushing my teeth or reading the news. Yes, it would be a big commitment — huge even. But hey, my method before wasn't getting me anywhere!
It doesn't have to be a lot of photos I told myself, but just as many as I can do in a short amount of time. And when that time was up, I would just stop.
I am a tad bit slow waking up in the morning. So, I decided this would be a perfect time to accomplish this. Best case, I would probably still be so sleepy and delirious, I wouldn't even be fully aware that I was doing it, and I might be surprised each evening when I had realized I actually accomplished the task!
Here's how I envisioned my mornings:
I would roll out of bed every morning, grab a can of Seattle's Best or Trader Joe's Iced Latte from the refrigerator and then turn on the computer. I could put on some music, a podcast or an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” or “Three's Company” on DVD and then I would begin attacking a small pile of slides or photos.
Still Deciding on a Photo Scanner to Use?
If you're interested in seeing which scanner I was using during this scanning challenge week you're reading about, or would like to see which I think are the best photo scanners on the market today, check out my Photo Scanning Resources page.
My First Day Back Scanning Photos
February 10, 2012 was the first day I started the scanning “machine” back up. I was sick with the beginnings of an upper respiratory infection so I knew things might go a little slow. Yet, I was still determined not to let myself down by skipping the first day.
I had already scanned over 300 photos from the work I've done over the last year or two. So, even though it didn't feel like it, I was already a little over 4% along on my scanning journey.
However, that first morning felt like I had just started from the beginning — like I had the impossible in front of me.
But you know what? I started. I just grabbed a few photo pages full of prints that my parents had taken in 1972 and I started to scan them.
And well, I also started to cough a little bit — stupid infection.
Turns out I was right about starting slow. In my defense though, it was my first day back scanning after some time. But by 9:39 a.m., about 45 minutes after I started, I had only scanned what seemed like a pathetic 10 paper prints!
I decided I was going to keep a digital log (journal) of each day's work so I could track my progress on this site. Here is my simple entry for day 1 that I will share with you: (ES stands for the software “Epson Scan”)
The details of what went wrong for me aren't that important for this post. I will save that for another time. Let's just say I tried to pre-label a unique number on each of my prints and then have my scanning software automatically attach this number to the .Tiff file for each scan. Think of it like a barcode.
Needless to say, it didn't work out so well. None of the numbers on the files matched what I had already written on the backs of the photos. So I used up a lot of time relabeling the files and trying to figure out how to actually make it work. I just can't make things easy on myself. Ever! 🙂
Regardless of the problems I ran into, I was still very happy. I had just completed day 1. And that 45 minutes was over before I knew it!
And get this. I finished actually wanting to scan more !! I was really having a good time seeing these slides I don't think I had even seen before. But, I had to stop and go to work — yeah the work that pays the bills. 🙂
Days 2 – 7 Scanning Photos
So here's how the rest of the week turned out:
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2
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FEB 11 |
Scanned 61 slides — Time Required: 4 HoursI had just bought a new antistatic slide cleaning brush and a hand-powered air blower. I was trying to figure out what was the most effective way to remove the dust from my slides. I even tried using the DIGITAL ICE scanning “filter” in combination with the brush and compressed air etc. It was a lot of testing which is why I spent 4 hours on just 61 slides. (Saturday) |
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3
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FEB 12 |
Scanned: None — Time Required: NoneDay three didn't go so well. I was so sick that morning, the thought of scanning slides felt like just about the last thing I was up for. Day three was spent on the couch with the cat a staring at our flat screen. (Sunday) |
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4
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FEB 13 |
Scanned 13 slides — Time Required: 23 MinutesApparently this was a pretty short day of scanning — not even a half hour. (Monday) |
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5
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FEB 14 |
Scanned 20 slides — Time Required: 68 MinutesI made a lot of mistakes this day trying to take shortcuts to make the scanning more efficient. I learned when you are scanning slides with the Epson V600 at least, you have to hit “Preview” each time when in the “thumbnail view” or in most cases it won't scan your next set of 4 slides correctly. This cost me a lot of time. Lesson learned. (Tuesday) |
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6
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FEB 15 |
Scanned 28 slides — Time Required: 58 MinutesThis was a very successful day. Other than losing my special archival writing pen, which took me about 10 minutes to find before I started, I didn't have any problems this day! I wrote this in my notes that day:
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7
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FEB 16 |
Scanned 29 slides — Time Required: 62 Minutes
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So How Did I Do?
For the mathematicians out there, you may have already figured out that in my first 7 days back, I scanned a total of 161 photos using a total of 8 hours and 16 minutes of my time. That's a little over 3 minutes per photo. I knew I could do better than that.
For some context of how well I did, I remembered seeing statistics about this on the scanning service ScanCafe's website. They have a page that does a good job convincing you that a service is the best way to go. It almost makes it seem like you are basically out of your mind if you even think you can scan your entire photo collection by yourself.
Well, let me rephrase that. The point they are trying to get across on their “doing scanning yourself” page is that it costs a lot of money and also requires a ridiculous amount of time. They write:
http://www.scancafe.com/image-preservation/do-it-yourselfAccording to research firm GfK North America, the average American adult has 3,000 old analog images. Scanning and repairing those, once you've learned how and bought the equipment, should take about 7.5 minutes per photo. For 3,000 photos, that's 22,500 minutes, or about 375 hours. That's nearly 10 workweeks — or 47 Saturdays at 8 hours a day.
Now, please don't let this paragraph scare you! I know it sounds pretty overwhelming. It's not that what they said is unrealistic. But, allow me to put things in perspective. Most of the 7.5 minutes they quoted for each photo is alloted to “repair” the image of dust and color shifting etc. in photo editing software — 5.5 minutes to be exact.
Some may disagree with me here, but you personally may find that a lot of your collection, if well cared for, may not require much if any repair. You may be satisfied with the results of using the “auto color correct” setting during scanning or in your image management software. And it's possible having a small amount of dust and scratches on your images won't bother you.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you may find that intensive repair work on every single photo in your collection is a luxury to you and is by no means necessary for you to be content with the results.
This situation reminds me of a great saying that I know I can't remind myself of too many times:
So even though repair is important to me, I'm really just concerned with scanning right now. I can do photo repairing anytime I want later. For me — and I would suggest you do the same if you asked me — it's most important to just get them all safely scanned first.
Time Required Just to Scan
Now, if we go back to ScanCafe's 7.5 minutes per photo estimate, they actually say it only takes 1-4 minutes to “complete each scan” — the most important part. Which sounds just about right from my experience during this first week.
This made me REALLY happy. Do you know why?
This makes me happy because really, I had a pretty average to almost poor first week. Seriously. I mean it was my first week back and I was a bit rusty. I had problems remembering my scanning techniques I had used over the last year or so. Also, I was doing some testing to figure out how to be the most efficient while scanning and removing dust from my slides. And on top of that I was sick.
Yet, I still managed to scan 161 photos in an average of around 3 minutes a piece. And most of those were slides and not prints. Slides take a scanner longer to scan than paper prints because of the higher resolution you have to scan them with.
By the last two days, once I had picked up momentum, I had improved and was scanning about 30 slides in almost exactly one hour.
Yes — that's a slide every 2 minutes !
Seriously. That's not bad. That's not bad for a pro-sumer level scanner and me just being a normal guy. What I mean is, I don't scan for a living.
YOU could easily achieve this pace too after a little bit of experience just doing it.
By the seventh day of this first week, I was thinking to myself that I would be the happiest guy alive if I could just wake up early enough that I could clear a full hour of my morning — first thing — just for scanning. Because if I could, I could continually hit this count of 30 slides a day.
And I know with paper prints, I can get through 40-50 of them in a single hour of scanning!
At this point I was so excited, I couldn't help but wonder how far along I would be in a year's time at this rate. Would I be halfway through? More? So I did the math.
Then How Long Would It Take You to Scan Your Entire Collection?
If I could scan just 30 photos a day, that would mean I would actually be finished with all of the photos I have here at my house in less than a year from now!
So You Might Be Saying To Yourself, “Who In the World Has a Free HOUR to Scan Each and Every Day !??”
Yeah, I suggested this goal to the guy that cuts my hair and he thought I was bloody insane (he's British). With a wife, a young son and a never-ending list of clients fighting for his time, he couldn't see any way to give up an hour a day to scan photos.
But here's the thing, I doubt you're going to need an hour each day. Not even close to it.
According to that earlier quote, if you have an average-sized collection, then you probably only have around 3,000 photos. Which means, if my math is correct, if you could find just 20 minutes a day in your busy schedule, you too could be finished scanning in just a year's time.
If you could scan 30 photos in 60 minutes, that means you are doing 10 photos every 20 minutes.
What If You Wanted to Scan Just Once a Week
Is scanning every day too much to expect from you? Okay, what if you waited and did it all on the weekend — say on a Saturday afternoon while the kids are playing with their friends. If you did all of the scanning in one sitting, it would only require a single time chunk of 2 hours and 20 minutes.
Hey, that's easily how much time many of us “waste” on social networking sites and watching mindless television shows every week here in the U.S.!
It's Time
I may have procrastinated for 8 years, but eventually, I finally realized how important this was to me and made it a priority in my life. And boy am I glad I did.
You will discover the treasures you've totally forgotten about or never knew you had.
Oh, and by the way, if you're already talking yourself out of this, telling yourself you can't do this because a year sounds like too long — like you're thinking you're never going to finish this project like you never finished learning to play the piano — just remind yourself this:
How many times a year do you say to yourself, “Man, it feels like just yesterday I [fill in the blank].”
Typically what you fill in this sentence with is something you did a year ago, like prepared your taxes, paid your car registration or celebrated your last birthday.
Before you know it, another year will pass you by. Only next year, your photo collection will have been scanned.
Just make this happen.
Whatever it takes.
Yes, you can do this.
You will never “find” time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.
I'm sure after reading this, you have some questions for me. I would be glad to answer them for you in the comments below.
I hope this inspires you. Cheers!
I way very expressed but I did not see mentioned about software needed to move scanned info to computer or editing software. Is this information in a different article? Thanks Johnny
Hi, can I use this method to scan my original watercolor paintings. The place I go to now has a scanner ay 720 dpi. I was hoping I could buy my own scanner to scan and print my own paintings.
Thanks
Hi. This article and the comments have been a fantastic read. Thank you. I am in the UK and currently seriously considering setting up my own photo scanning business. Nothing too big, more focussed on high quality and personal customer service. I have been checking out the prices that various other companies charge for photo/negative/slide scanning and what their USP may be. I am also pondering which scanners to buy as a starting point. Trying to find a balance between speed, quality and price.
I intend to scan my family archive and perhaps some work for a couple of friends, to get myself up to speed before I launch a business. I may be able to give you an update sometime later this year.
i am considering including the option to have entire photo albums scanned page by page and then printing out a book of the photos, so it becomes a duplicate of the album, including any text that was on the pages. Anyhow, I’m grateful for the insight your article here has given me.
im also curious to know if a more powerful computer attached to the scanner will result in quicker scan times ?
Your dad is Brendan Fraser?!?
What is happening in this story… are you aware that there are other choices than spending a year slaving away at a flatbed scanner or spending 7k for scanning service?? I spent $500 for a photo scanner that scans 100 photographs in less than a minute. I scanned in my entire collection in less than two evenings. I then spent another evening scanning in my friends collections… I then returned the scanner for a full refund. End of story.
What is the name brand of the scanner that has the capabilities to do this please?
Hi Barbara, check out the comment I just wrote to “Are you for real?” I listed the sheet-fed scanner I would recommend someone check out first if they you are looking for speed over “archival quality” options and capabilities.
At the time this post was originally written, the “sheet-fed” automatic “photo capable” scanners with decent quality weren’t priced for consumers. They were $4,000 (USD) or more, and were hard to find. As you pointed out, now years later, you can buy one that’s at least advertised to be for scanning photos in the $500-$700 range that will produce satisfactory quality if your expectations aren’t too high.
There are a lot of compromises you have to make to scan photographs with these auto-feed scanners. Some of the most important being that they are document scanners that have modified software that has been adjusted to work when scanning photos. They use cheaper image sensors (suitable for documents) instead of the high-quality sensors that are able to fit in the larger casings of photo-quality flatbed scanners. Also, these little sheet-fed scanners can only scan paper prints in specific sizes and thicknesses — so no film at all — and the insides get dirty very quickly, especially the rollers. So be prepared to re-scan a lot of your prints when you find your scanned images have white lines across them. Additionally, the software that comes with these scanners won’t have all of the customizable and advanced features we are accustomed to finding with our flatbed scanners meant for high-quality photo scanning (an excellent mid-level high-quality scanner I would recommend is this Epson model).
This all being said, if you aren’t trying to produce “archival quality” scans — for example maybe you’re scanning to get some pictures up on a social media website and that’s their only purpose — then one of these little quick scanners might be a great tool for you. I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap model that I use all the time to scan documents (and convert them to searchable .PDF files) like receipts and paperwork all the time. They are fantastic for this purpose! Wouldn’t want to live without one now. But I wouldn’t use it to make my one and only archival scan of an important photo to pass on to future generations.
But, if you have “basic goals” and have just the right type of photo collection that is made up of analog photos specifically suitable for this type of scanner — so paper prints not too small, not too big, no 35mm slides, no film negatives etc, no “heirloom” paper prints (too thin and fragile to risk the strong feeding motors) — and you value speed of the scan over getting an “archival-quality” scan, then I would recommend you first check out the Epson FastFoto FF-680W. This one is in that $500-$700 range (sometimes depending on the sale at the time). When my ScanSnap documents scanner stops working some day, I will definitely be buying the latest model of the FastFoto to replace it.
Lastly, call me old fashioned or whatever you’d like here, but I personally don’t condone or recommend others buy a scanner with the intention to use it and then return it for a full refund. Hey, maybe it’s because I grew up watching “Little House on the Prairie” with my Great Grandmother. 😉
Thanks for your perspective on the Epson FastFoto scanners!
Do you know if anyone has ever contacted Epson to ask if the FastFoto scanners use the same “cheaper” sensors as their document scanners? I had the impression that the FastFoto scanners were targeted toward bulk photo scanning specifically because a) they had better sensors than document scanners, b) I believe they also scan slower to capture photo quality, and c) the price seems much higher than document counterparts.
Id hate to think it’s all marketing hype ???? as far as I can tell, the FastFoto models are the only bulk photo scanners marketed toward consumers other than the Plustek drop-in model, but even that is not really bulk scanning it’s just different than a flatbed scanner.
To that point… where can one find commercial grade bulk photo scanners? Costco recently closed their photo centers and I tried to inquire as to their hardware but didn’t get an answer and now the equipment is all gone.
I spoke with an Epson representative (in person) in the beginning of 2018 at a convention, and he told me the FastFoto models were the result of customers requesting a speedy option over a flatbed. So, they took their “sheet-fed” document scanners and re-wrote/updated their scanning software so that it would digitally “enhance” scanned photos to try and make them look as good as we are used to seeing photos come out of their Perfection flatbed line of scanners.
So yes, their FF models use the thinner (so they can fit in the tight areas of “document” scanners), cheaper CIS (Contact Image Sensor) and not one of the higher quality CCD (Charge-coupled device) sensors that is found in their mid and high-end flatbed (Perfection) flatbed scanners.
The representative much preferred their flatbed line because of how “noisy” the scanned images look before they are “enhanced,” but basically was implying, “to each their own” when it comes to speed over quality.
A great read, timing is everything. Our family Just had to put our 18 year old cat (Willy) to sleep this week …. as I type this my daughter is going thru boxes of photos since 2002 (when he arrived) to find photos of our loved one. I guess it is time to find a scanner ….. However, question? are you able to scan directly into your computer (I have an Apple), this would be such a time saver? If so how? scanner recommendation? Thank you Sue-Z
Hi! Can anyone help me? I scanned and saved my entire photo collection (52,000+ photos) to Picassa.
I also made a backup to an external hard drive, using Picassa’s backup tool. Then my computer died.
And now I don’t know how to upload the photos to a new computer!
Unfortunately, Google no longer supports Picassa, so I can’t get any help from them.
If you can share your knowledge we me I would be forever grateful.
Thanks,
Al Novak alvak1144@hotmail.com
I spent several months (off and on) with my aging father scanning his large collection of slides. He looked at every one and we probably actually scanned about a third of them (many landscapes). The time I spent hearing his memories of days gone by, and his sharing memories with my mother brought hours of enjoyment to all three of us. Once they were on the computer, I made the picture collection his screen saver and my mother would sit up for hours in the night (insomnia) viewing them and reminiscing. The time spent was invaluable. They are both gone now, but I will always cherish the enjoyment that that “time consuming” job brought to us.
Record the conversation with your cell phone when talking with dad or grandma. Save the audio file with the pictures. That invaluable time can be shared as well.
Great site –
I know when I started out the project a few years ago this was one of my first questions. While I envisioned just sending them out, I always had the feeling that something would happen to my only copies.
And while I started scanning prints, a couple weeks later, I found the negatives (which were thought to 9k+ of them. And while the flatbed scanner was much quicker with the negatives, it still was taking forever and I also had a batch of those APS negatives… so the search started.
There wasn’t may services out there for the APS film, but I came across the digital lab unit called the Pakon scanner (F335 model), which was made for the Kodak minilabs. And sure the hardware was dated (you have to use a Windows XP machine, dedicated or virtual), but with the online community I was able to find a unit and get it working.
Those 9K+ negatives took about one week at a few hours a day to do – so if you have your negatives still, I would recommend you look around for a Pakon unit – if you only have 35mm then the F135 will be more then enough.
You guys really help me out . I really need this information.
Greetings,
Long shot question…but I’m looking for original material from the 50s & 60s for oil paintings. Can I use some of your photos? How can I see more?
Thanks!
So glad I found this post… I have over 20000 prints sitting in 4 countries. I wish I read your post sooner. But hey, like you mentioned, nothing happened when I did nothing so why not do a little at a time? Love this! Thank you 🙂
very inspiring! I was feeling very overwhelmed with the knowledge that if I didnt scan my mother’s photos they would be lost forever.
I seem to be the designated keeper of the photos. I am doing it for my grandchildren. I am going to take your advice about making it a daily practice. How do you eat an elephant….. one bite at a time……Great article
I am curious as to what you did with your slides and photos after you got them scanned. I have all of the “Keep” slides scanned already and they take up way too much space. I like your advice of just do 30 prints or 30 minutes each day and you will finish eventually. It is hard to start when it seems like such a huge task.
It’s possible that someone in my family who inherits all of my work someday will decide to throw out or originals. But, as long as I’m alive, I’ve decided I’m going to hold onto them. If not because of my use for this website (demonstrations, testings, and photoshoots), also because of reason number 1 and 2 on my list of the 4 reasons I won’t throw them out.
I moved all of my slides to these containers. My prints, they’re all still in temporary plastic banker boxes and up on shelves. Surprised they aren’t in amazing archival-safe long-term storage containers? I am a bit too, but I pull them out often to photograph them for the blog posts on this website, and to video record them for my membership training courses, so I need them to be easily accessible, and not tucked perfectly away.
You’re so right. It really is hard to get started on the massive project. But, as you brought up, a little bit at a time really does work! I found that picking a stack of my favorite photos, that I just couldn’t wait to have digitized and accessible in my computer, was an amazing and encouraging way to get the ball rolling on day one of scanning. 😉
Nice!
After my father’s death, I spent nearly four years scanning more than 13,000 slides and photographs. I didn’t have your dedication (plus, I travel for a living), so I did it on my days off, a few hours at a time. It was relaxing and ultimately rewarding.
you may have answered this question already, but how did you go about naming and thus archiving the digital pictures?
Hi Margo, check out my blog post about naming scanned photos to get a good start. :coffee:
I have approximately 5000 slides in Kodak Carousel trays. These are what I call the “keepers”; there may be another 3000 “rejects”. Prints: I just completed my first sort into 6 large boxes: 1950 & prior, 1960’s 70′, 80’s, 90’s, etc. and a box of “unidentified” dates. Negative’s [I suppose as many as prints, but not accompanying the prints. Video: 8mm, Super 8mm, – 75 rolls [estimate]. I have been looking at you’re website for some years now and, this year, I am going to join the site, read the content, buy the equipment, and begin scanning. Obviously, I will have to have the videos done by a “service”. That’s my story. I am looking forward to the challenge, but more than that, I looking forward to the “memories”. Oh yes, I have all of my digital pictures/videos on external hard drives.
Thank you so much! We are going to go travelling in our retirement and cannot /do not want to ship all the albums all around the world…. we’ve already done that! From UK – New Zealand, Singapore, Bahrain, UAE, now it has to stop!
BUT, What did you do with the physical albums?? I can’t imagine throwing them away!! But that’s why you scan them, right??
Regards, Lorraine !
thank you! our Mother just passed at 105, and we have photos from her family, Dad’s family and our own -I think more than what you had. We have lots of Albums, as in scrapbooks where Grandma guled the pictures or articules on a page – other than the scanner on my printer, the Epson V600 looks too small for this. what to do? any ideas?
The essential advice here is: do NOT simply attempt to scan/digitize every last photo and slide in your collection. Unless you are a working Pro who has to archive exhaustively to preserve valuable originals, similar dups, in order to catalog and document for future resale and/or copyright defense, the sobering reality is you’re lucky if one in ten deserve preserving. The rest belong in the trash, because they are inferior compositions, exposures, duplicates, mundane meaningless scenes with bland humans doing nothing with no expressions or even identification. Before you think of scanning endless piles of photos, think like a pro; be clinical, critical. Who is your audience? Friends, family, wider range of relatives older and younger? Who, ultimately, is going to care? Curate your archives. Cull the photos into groups of particular importance, by special events, familiar faces, some decent quality snapshots, documentary significance, historical benchmarks. Now you can begin scanning the fraction you have remaining, because if you postpone editing, you will only waste time and still have thousands of digital images you have not learned to edit. Put together a slideshow collection for major trips, life events, and then for every five years of living, so that every image tells a worthwhile story. No one should be tortured to sit through more than half an hour shows, and if you waste weeks thinking every single shot is precious, you fail to grasp how only a small number of significant images can provide the recollections for anything of import in your life.
I scanned each and every photograph. I numbered them all by subject and put them all into folders. Then, I burned all of the images onto DVDs, which I gave to brothers, sisters and other family members.
You see, I wasn’t trying to create a show or display for anyone but myself and my family.
And I treasure each one… even all the bad ones that are inferior in composition, exposure, subject, or otherwise.
Agree! I went through each and every photo I own and threw away a ton! I felt so much better afterwards. Now when I start my scanning project I won’t be wasting time. You have made a valuable point.
I decided to read this article while enjoying my last sips of coffee. Since it’s my birthday I can do anything I want, so I am. I’ve been thinking of how to best scan my photos & documents. I haven’t counted them but have at least 20 boxes of different sizes PLUS about 50 photo albums full to capacity. I’m starting with the old stuff, all the documents & photos from my ancestors so I can post to my FTM media files. I have a brand new Epson WF 7710 scanner I can work from my PC, although it sits too far from my chair to just turn and reload the photos. That’s fine, it’s good to get up and move around and just a few steps away – the footprint is larger than my 7 y.o. Epson and did not fit on my desk where I already have files, books and another B&W cheap HP to use daily. – we’re overloaded w printers since my husband also has his own B/W & color cheap Cannon he uses daily too. My question – is there a software program that will allow me to scan small snapshots at once then separate the images, cutting them out to individual images so I can save them each? Am I looking for the impossible? I already use the very old Jasc bc I can’t learn the Corel 8 that I have, and as a trial downloaded a free Irfran and saved a few images yesterday there. But it seems to work the same as Corel so another learning curve, hopefully easier. Any advise? At 79 I may not have as long as you do to get all these done, and I still run a small consulting business and write books for publication that require intensive recipes testing. Basically I work 1 week a month only so have 3 free weeks to enjoy this hobby.
My printer will do what you are asking. Just put the photos on the printer bed and scan them, then use the scanning software (for the printer) to separate them. My printer is a HP (Hewlett Packard).
Hi Curtis,
I’m a new subscriber and so excited about FINALLY getting started on my major photo/slide scanning project. I wondered if your have any insight into the last obstacle I’ve let stall me for way too long. I had an Epson Perfection 3170 scanner which I used years ago to scan slides…..wonderful results. Then I upgraded my laptop to MacBook Pro (mid 2009 model) with OS X Yosemite (10.10.5) I could no longer get the Epson scanner software to work with the laptop. The Image Capture software on the Mac didn’t do the trick either. So now I’m very aware of assuring that the scanner and laptop are compatible. I want to buy either the Epson V600 or V800…..but I also think I’ll be upgrading my laptop within the year and will thus be using the latest OS X at that point. Will the V600 or V800 and the accompanying Epson Scan Software still be compatible with the newest MacBook Pro laptop? I don’t want to get into this game of leap frogging to stay compatible!!
Second question: I do have a lot of slides to scan. I would think that the V800 ability to scan more slides at one time over the V600 is a significant time saver and worth the extra $$$. Do you agree?
Any help is appreciated and here’s to getting my project up and running!!!
Maggie
HI, Check out Hamrick VueScan. Their software has enabled me to continue to use my nice Coolscan V dedicated slide/film scanner far longer then my OS would allow. I have been using it for over 5 years. I am now on Win 10. The software is another learning curve but there is plenty of tips available. Plus they don’t keep changing it up on me.
In the middle of a scan project for my family. That’s a great photo of your parents! Mine were married in 1963. 🙂
Oh thank you! Yeah, I really like that photo as well. 🙂 I hope you scanning project is going well!
OK so I have about 10,000 photos and slides. I need to scan them and then get everything onto 7 different flash drives for my siblings; Is that the best way to share them with my sibs?
Have you reviewed the Fujitsu Scan Snap iX500? that was another recommendation.
Did you use the Epson V600?
Anxious to get started on this very long, slow process but want to be most efficient and have good resolution on the photos.
Thanks for your thoughts
Hi Rita, My advice would be to save your photos to a cloud service like OneDrive or Amazon. Reason I say this is that getting the photos to your siblings is super simple if you save them to the cloud. Also the scanning process is very long if you don’t use the right tools. So check out photo scanning software, like http://ScanSpeeder.com. It will auto-detect multiple photos, crop, straighten, and save simultaneously as both TIFF (archival) and JPEG (sharing). Plus you can scan right from the photo album (plastic film included!) if you want so you don’t have to worry about ripping your photos. Tag photos as you go so you capture the important details written on them like location, dates, who is in it, etc. I’m Sandra from ScanSpeeder – so full disclosure here. Just want you to know that the project can be speeded up 4x faster using the right tool.
Sandra, What you are talking about above sounds like the type of system I need for my huge project. I have at least 40 photo albums full from my parents. I need to get this done before more are ruined and they take up way too much space! Do you have to lay each album or book onto a flatbed scanner? Can you then put them in a slideshow and have the tags show? I too want to share them with my siblings so I like the idea of saving them to “the cloud”.
I have scanned individual photos from the 1800s one by one and I just can’t do that again!
Any info or further advice is appreciated. I need to get started on this ASAP. Thank you!
Shari,
That’s correct. You will lay the photo album directly on the flatbed of your scanner. You can leave the plastic sheet intact. When you write the captions, they are meta tags meaning you will see them as the photo’s title in Windows Explorer. Since you want to create slideshows, save your scanned photos as both TIFF (archival quality) and JPEG (sharing quality). When you create your slideshow, you will use the JPEG scanned photo. To try out the photo scanning software, you can download the free trial at https://ScanSpeeder.com
What did you do with all the pictures that you scanned? Do you still keep them or toss them? I am about to embark on this journey but I m having anxiety on what to do with the hard copies ………
Angela, this is certainly a very personal choice and often hard we all have to make. I have no intention of throwing away any of my family’s analog originals. They will at least be around as long as I live. But, family that survives me will then have to make this decision for themselves if they want to hold onto them any longer. But, I certainly understand why others would want to toss them after making it through the entire project of digitizing them. For many people, it’s just about minimization of their lives — reducing clutter.
If you haven’t seen this article, check out this article that includes a section called “The 4 Reasons Why I Will Never Throw Out My Original Prints and Slides”. I’m sure most of my article tries to persuade you to keep your originals, but I’m fairly sure there are probably some comments at the end where other people give some reasons why they feel it safe to throw theirs away.
If you’re on the fence trying to decide one way or the other, maybe something in this article will make this decision, one way or the other, easier on you.
My mom was one of 10 children born to parents who emigrated from Norway in the late 1800’s and settled in Canada. Mom was the only sibling to move to the U.S. and throughout her life made it a priority to stay close to her tight-knit family (a major challenge before the Internet). My uncle, our family historian, passed away recently and to my great surprise, yesterday I received a 25 pound box of very old documents and an untold number of rare and precious black and white photos. I now have the privilege and responsibility of preserving and sharing these treasures with my relatives…hopefully before we lose the last brother who might help identify people and places in the photos.
Not only do I have to select a scanner, but would also appreciate guidance on how to organize the images before scanning them, if needed. The photos are of many different sizes and there are no slides. Of course, being able to recognize the faces of unidentified family members, would be a gift to all of us.
Ultimately, I hope to merge the documents and photos into a story that will be meaningful to my 27 cousins, their children and future generations. I feel like I must get the decisions made and the process completed as quickly as possible, as I won’t have this window of opportunity much longer. Guidance on the process, technology and any other need-to-know topics would be greatly appreciated! Thank you very much for sharing your time and expertise.
I think Curtis can give you more guidance about the scanner, This is the first time I saw this post. I have been scanning Slides and pictures over the past two years like almost Curtis did except I have stopped and started due to other obligations work etc.. I have done so far 2900( and have scores of digital photos from Phones etc). My Scanner broke today I think( have a white band going through). While searching for scanners found this site. I am thinking of Epson 550 or 600, It is between $190 to $225. The way I did it is, scanned the pictures depending upon the size(1 to 4 at a time), saved it as Tiff format, the software assigned names in a dated folder, saved off to another computer, I had to cut each picture out of the scanned image using adobe photo shop elements, If i can figure out the date of the picture say it was taken in March 23, 2000, I will start with Y20000323_SequenceNumber_TheSheetNameScannedInto. This way i know the date and where the scanned image is. It also serves as a backup. If I don;t know the date I put Y99999999 and may be some one from the family can figure out. The important thing is to get the picture out there and then go back and add more info. Some times old picture at the back they had wriiten names or places etc, I just scan those as well and keep it next to the picture. The plan is once all done go back and add meta data and create slide shows. Some times i find pictures of my kids when they were babies and i just keep looking at them instead of scanning!. It is time well invested. There are loads of more pictures, I am disappointed my scanner broke, Have to wait till I get new one.
Hi Carla,
First step is get a scanner. I’ve tried most manufacturers as I’m a photo scanning expert and part of my job is to test scanners. That said, I really like Epson scanners. I don’t work for Epson just tend toward that manufacturer as they seem to have good drivers that always work well for me. Canon too is a good pick. Canon also does a nice job on keeping drivers functioning well. That said, you have an enormous project ahead with 25 boxes. Once you have you scanner, you then need photo scanning software. Of course my preference is http://scanspeeder.com because I work for ScanSpeeder. That said, the reason I use ScanSpeeder every day in my work is because it auto-detects multiple photos, lets me tag them as I go to capture the details written on the photo (date, location, who is in it, etc.), auto-crops, auto-straightens, and saves simultaneously to JPEG (sharing) and TIFF (archival). Plus it lets you scan directly from a photo album (plastic included!) so you don’t have to worry about ripping your photos. So, once you have your scanner and photo scanning software you can get started. Personally, I save my family photos on the cloud. I use OneDrive but places like Amazon also offer a good service. It’s insanely simple to save photos to a cloud service. Its really no different than saving to a laptop or a memory stick. Added benefit is that my photos can be shared with anyone, anywhere, on pretty much any device (like iphone, laptop, etc.) and I don’t have to worry about backups when I have them saved to the cloud. Finally, you can get started scanning. I save my photos to a specific folder in my OneDrive dedicated to a specific photo album, box of photos, or stack of documents. I have some folders called, “Drieger Family Photo Album 1957” or “WWII photos taken”, etc. Then I scan all the photos in the said photo album or box. I tag the photos as I go (ScanSpeeder lets me do this) which permanently embeds the data in the photo (date, location, who is in it, and other information that I think my family will enjoy), then I save the photos simultaneously as both JEPG and TIFF. The JPEG is for sharing (social media, email, slide shows) and the TIFF is the archival quality. I scan at 600 dpi 24-bit color. I have scanned thousands of photos and tested lots of scanners and can honestly say I find this dpi and color scheme the optimal level between speed and quality. Lower dpi and future enlargements for printing may not be at the quality I want. Higher dpi and the scanning is tedious (any scanner…). 24-bit color is fantastic for everything, including black and white. High color like 48-bit many experts (myself included) think is again too slow for something that doctors say we cannot even see with the human eye. Anyway, good luck with your project and happy scanning.
Im planning to start scanning. the snanner is so expensive, and scanning on a regular scanner will take forever. Did you edit as you went along, espcially if you have 4 per page?
Hi Soraya. I’m not sure where you live, or what your budget is. Where I live in the United States, a good photo scanner can be found between $90 and $200. And I know this is relative to how much money you have and make. But, compared to paying someone else to scan all of your photos for you, this price is still quite affordable.
And I know it seems like it will take “forever”, but it really doesn’t. Like all worthwhile tasks, it just takes patience and consistent time applied over a period of time, and you will get the project done. When I was a kid, I wanted to learn how to play the violin. Now THAT seemed like it took forever! 😉 I had to practice several times a week for years!
I personally chose not to do any edits while I scanned. Instead, while I was scanning, I used that time to clean off the next batch of photos, number them and give them decent starting filenames. But, you can edit as you go if you’d like.
I just did over 5,000 photographs in less than a week – delivered to the client for less than $1000.
I have a high speed scanner. Unless you have a high speed scanner, you are wasting time.
I am sure you are happy with your scanner – which one is it? I am looking to buy a new one.
Hi Laurie! Would you mind telling me what scanner you are using…or the process in order to do 5,000 photos in less then a week? * I have done some research that has indicated that the “high speed scanners do not get the quality of some of the others.” I am certain I will not compete with your business….. I have also noticed that scanners strictly for negatives, film rolls, and tape….video reels…can be purchased separate…and have stand alone options at a high pixel and color ratio.
Can you please assist me in making the right choices….I am a disabled vet..and cannot afford to make a financial mistake.
Anyone else out there ideas…thoughts????
Thank you Curtis..I appreciate your hard work…in supporting us…in our ventures.
Laurie, I have an HP Officejet Pro 8600. Do you think that would work? I have probably about 5,000 photos as well.
Curtis – I want to thank you so much for this post! YOU inspired to JUST GET STARTED. I have been staring at my boxes and boxes of photos for the last 8 years, knowing that I needed to do it, but feeling overwhelmed combined with guilty. I put it off due to the enormous task ahead, and I can’t afford to have them done for me. But I read your post, and you’re so right. It will NEVER happen unless I just get going a little at a time. And I did! I decided just to use my normal scanner combined with the printer instead of stressing too much over perfect quality…they really looked better than the actual photo once scanned, so I just went with PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION.
First I sorted all the photos by my family, my Dad’s family, my Mom’s etc, and dumped the duplicates, blurry photos, etc. I did this one box at a time and set up manilla envelopes for each type of group. I tried to sort a bit chronologically, but I didn’t want to get bogged down on the order of the scans too much. The important thing in my mind was just to get them DIGITIZED, and work on organizing online albums in order later. I was concerned about losing my pictures to a fire or other disaster, so my goal was to get them ONLINE in iPhoto and get rid of those boxes in my house. So, I would take one group at a time and scan for 45 min in front of the TV every night after work. That was all I could do to keep my hands healthy due working on a computer all day..and I’ve had carpal tunnel, so had to be careful. I did more on the weekend, but I never worked for more than 1 hour or so at a time to rest my hands and arms. Every night, I would back up my photos on an external hard drive and stored it into my car trunk just to preserve what I’d done each day.
The biggest group? My ex husband’s family photos, which I had promised to copy so that his deceased brothers children would have family photos too. (No way would my ex be doing this..that’s why I still had the photos). So I started with those. Result? I was able to scan 709 wonderful family photos going back 3 generations in my ex-husband’s family, put them on flash drives and sent them to my ex sister-in-law, and the 4 nieces and nephews of my ex. Took me about 1.5 months. I also gave them ‘sneak previews’ on Facebook, which they just LOVED. We discovered that the niece looks exactly like her great great grandmother! I received sincere and emotional thank you’s from all of them for giving back wonderful memories of loved ones who have passed away, or are still here. There were tears but there was joy too for them to see those photos. So it was SO WORTH IT. Then I handed all the originals to my Ex and closed that chapter of my life.
Then it was on to MY kids, my family, vacations, etc. I wasn’t sure my grown boys would even care about these photos, but I though someday they might. Well, guess what? They LOVE seeing them on the laptop NOW. And we can see them so much better online than we can in the actual photo due to being able to blow it up. I’m rounding the corner now to the end of the project…I’ve only got about 6 envelopes to go and I’ll be done with at least getting them digitized. I have a tremendous sense of accomplishment, and I just feel good about myself for doing this. Stress of the idea of losing the photos is now erased, and I can move on to doing other things I want to do in my spare time. (Attacking my enormous booklist and Netflix queue..lol). Eventually I will do some cool online photo albums with captions, etc. But for now, I’m just happy getting them online. I’ll probably get them all in the Cloud too for extra protection.
Just want YOU to know you made a difference by your post, and thank you so much for inspiring someone you don’t even know! This has actually created a positive impact for me, and my whole extended group of family and good friends. I had no idea this work would have this type of effect, but it did!
Thank you SO much for taking this time out of your day to write and let me know all of this. I really appreciate that!
What a wonderful story you have. I love that you are proof it’s just setting your mind to doing it, accepting the quality level is going to be as good as you can currently make it (it doesn’t have to be perfect!), and you just do a little bit at a time. It’s just consistency. The same amount, time after time, and eventually, you add up how far you’ve gotten, and you can’t believe it!
And it’s funny isn’t it? — how some family doesn’t express an interest in something, until it’s on a platform that interests them. Your boys didn’t express too much of an interest when it was in a “burdensome” analog format. But, you got it “up to their level” — on a computer — and now all of a sudden, they can see all of these past stories being played out in front of them, and they can easily flip through it at their own pace. And now they love them again!! 😉
I’ve feared that many who come to this post on this website for the first time, usually from Google searches, are grossly intimidated by how long it took me that first day back scanning (because I was scanning slides, and slides take longer than prints to scan, because of the higher resolution and all the hand dusting I do to each one before scanning).
Since many people are impatient, I worry they not only wouldn’t be inspired, but worse, they would never consider what you’ve been accomplishing, because it won’t happen quick enough. So, I was very happy to hear you are one who wasn’t afraid enough to take action, and do something for yourself and your family that you knew was so important. 🙂
Thank YOU for letting me know I made a difference to you and your family. Your words are very special to me, and I’m so happy to learn how much you’ve accomplished. I’m very proud of you Kathy.
Kathy, good to know I have a like-minded organizer out there. Yesterday and today I just went with a basket for each side of the family. I *may* try to sort them in some type of order before I scan, but haven’t decided on that yet. My mom has done all the genealogy in the family using Family TreeMaker software so I may try to use those groupings in the naming. I don’t know, will probably have to mull this over for a few more weeks. ????
I have a HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 Premium. ll-In-One. Do you think it will scan photos well?
Almost anything can scan in paper photos decently. The cost of a normal scanner is so cheap that better to spend the money for a decent scanner that is fast. Quality of software makes a huge difference. I can scan 4-6 paper photos at once and the scanner will crop and separate each of them. Huge time saver.
How will the scanner crop and separate each of them? Really? Is it a special scanner or will my HP Officejet Pro 8600 do the same thing? That’s amazing!
So how did you manage the naming of each scanned photo? This has to greatly add to the time involved. I am ready to get busy!
Hi Steward. That’s great to hear you are ready to get busy! Congrats for making the move forward.
Like anything that adds value to a process, time is added when you care about quality filenames.
Thankfully, scanning software can help with naming from the start by attributing an initial filename for you, even with an added index number counting up as you go along if you’d like.
And then there are “batch renaming” techniques inside of photo managers — such as outlined in my latest article: “How to Batch Change Titles and Descriptions in Photos for macOS“. Or there are third-party programs that do nothing but batch renaming. My favorite one right is called “A Better Rename“.
Here’s to your new project! :beer:
Love this post!! So helpful! Can you explain how I can be sure to scan my photographs on in the highest resolution possible? I have a Canon printer/scanner.
Hi Julie. Happy to hear you enjoyed my post. :coffee:
Technically, you actually don’t want to use the highest resolution possible that your scanner offers in the settings. Instead, to produce great archival photos, you want to use an appropriate resolution for each photo, based on the size of your original photo. For example, if you are scanning very small photos — like wallet sized prints — you want to use a higher dpi (ppi) during the scan, than you would a very large print like an 8″x10″.
Check out my post on scanning dpi’s for the details on this. 😉
..scanning is turtle slow, quality stinks, hands down the dumbest way to digitize your slides photos!
camera phone hands down the best and fastest method, takes average know-how. i made a quick gizmo to hold my phone on edge, a slot to hold color slide in front of lens and mounted a light source behind the slide, wiped each slide with microfiber cloth, insert in slot snap photo, rinse and repeat..i did need to tap the phone screen now and then to focus, no biggy..used google photos to send them from phone to pc reply to this comment if you need help, happy trails
Hey,
I was thinking to buy my mother a scanner as she has traveled for MANY years and has I believe around 25 000 slides(taht number is unconfimed :). What do you suggest? Ive seen the V600 pop up int he comments quite often but that is way too much. I haev serached a bit and found this https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B0074H6NLC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=3370&creative=24114&creativeASIN=B0074H6NLC&linkCode=as2&tag=fotopro-21 to be a decently good one. Also, I had a couple of core questions:
what is .tiff?!
Why is it better than .jpeg?
Do these scanners scan a slide as a file and just copy it to a drive?
How imporntant are high dpis(like there are quite cheap scanners that do 7000dpi), and how much does it take more or lees per level of dpi? Is it truly worth the time over acertain level of dpi?
Also, having never seen a scanned slide:
Does dust show up so bad on the pictures?
Is the colour loss so drammatic(some are 35 years old if not a tad more)?
Are there really no self feeding slide scanners out there at an accesible price? Why not?!
Is there no way to “cheat” a feeding scanner, into a loop, using some bricolage?(as in increasing a feeder size…)?
Thanks.
TIFFs are the exact scanner information and contain many more shades of color and no compression artifacts. The file sizes are also much larger as a result. A jpg might only contain 256 color shades whereas a tiff can contain 4096 or 165535 or even higher. Monitors don’t display all these shades of color, but printers can. Storage is so cheap it makes sense to save as TIFF nowadays.
Yeah dust does show up on pictures, especially landscapes. You should get your photos clean as possible.
Color loss can be bad if the film was poor quality and/or the photos were printed on paper that has degraded. A lot of software has the ability to take out the reddish or yellowing. The results can be dramatic.
For paper photos, a high dpi isn’t that necessary since most printed photos rarely contain over 300-400 dpi anyway. If you scan at 600, you are getting all the information. For actual film, you cannot have enough dpi. Regular cheaper flatbed scanners cannot match the quality of slide scanners. The DPI they advertise isn’t the actual dpi. A 7000dpi $600 flatbed might only produce 1700 real pixels or less. The resolving power of the lens is the issue. If the film was taken by a serious photographer with a real camera and using slide film like kodachrome or ectachrome, investing in a real slide scanner makes sense. They can scan darker slides with twice the resolution of flatbeds. It makes a big difference. If the film was just normal negatives on a cheap camera, an Epson v600 or the like would be fine.
So did you finish??
Not quite Jacob. I mean, are we ever finished?? 🙂
I suppose there are some people with finite collections already in their possession. But, I live thousands of miles from family members that still possess analog copies of photos I want to scan and add to my collection. I’ve scanned thousands and thousands of photos to date, almost all that my parents had been storing and I’ve brought to my house, but I still won’t feel my job is done until I’ve also filled in the missing “visual stories” from my additional family members and childhood friends etc.
Beautiful post! What I’d give to shake your hand and exchange stories!
what kind of scanner did you use for both slides and prints? flatbed? did you try a scanner that accepts a group pictures? what resolution did you choose?
I didn’t see this in any of the previous posts–point it out if you’ve already covered this subject:
Were there reasons you didn’t use a photo app on an iphone or ipad — like Heirloom–
instead of a scanner for photos?
Please reply–I’m very curious. Thank you.
Good question. The optics and sensor quality of smart phones (and the like) are definitely improving every day. And, it’s certainly true that smartphone applications are as well. So, it’s only fair to say people like myself who are trying to keep up with improvements in the workflow of scanning analog photographs to digital should try out and be fair to consider a smartphone workflow with analog photos. When I started my scanning process, the quality of my digital camera wasn’t good enough to even consider using it.
An engineer of photo scanners should really be the one to answer this, but my initial reaction to you is to say a good flatbed scanner will offer your analog prints, a better lens, sensor, angle and lighting than most people would be willing to produce when capturing their paper prints.
There are lots of people using nice DSLR cameras, setup on sturdy rigs above their photos on a table top, and using high quality lights (with the correct color temperature) to get the optimal exposure. This means the camera has to be at the perfect angle, and the lights have to be at the perfect angle too. And, if you are looking for consistency across your entire photo collection, you will need to make sure your setup is exactly the same each time, and the ambient light, coming in from windows or from “house lights” are the same as well.
So, if you have basic goals for your photo collection, and you are able to lock down your iPhone above your photos so there isn’t any movement (which makes your photos soft and sometimes blurry if it moves at all), and you can produce decent lighting that has a good color temperature and at an angle with no reflections, then you might be very happy with the digital reproduction your iPhone produces.
I think people today, who are really only considering flatbeds for digitizing their paper prints, are really conscientious about getting the highest quality, at the expense of time and convenience that a smart phone would give them.
And, then there’s also the fact that a high end flatbed makes scanning film — negatives and slides — quite easy.
Curtis you are amazing! I asked my daughter what she wanted for her birthday and her answer led me to you! She wants childhood photos. I too have been “thinking” about doing this for quite some time and you have brought it to a realistic place in my life. My 89 year old dad has slides and many old photos I’d also like to capture. So… I’ll order the Epson v600 but I don’t know what exactly to do next with regard to storage space on my computer, the best Windows software program to buy to deal with all aspects I will encounter in my project. Do you recommend a book or have you written one by now? I hope you are still answering questions or at least receiving praise. Thank you so much.
I digitized 27,169 paper photos in less than a week for roughly $1000 – and that was for someone ELSE to do the actual work. NO, I am not kidding.
Slides and negs should be scanned, yes. But for those out there digitizing paper photos, I have found there is little benefit to scanning paper photos from 35mm negs vs photographing them with the dSLR you already own. The resolution of the final image will not be limited by the digital capture, it will be limited by the original photo. I used a 24 MP dSLR and I could make out the grain of the film in my final images. I set up a copy stand (read: I suspended my camera upside down from a tripod), and a remote shutter trigger under my foot, leaving my two hands free to position the photos in place and remove them afterward. I did use a pair of studio lights I happen to own already ($200). Time per photo: 2 secs.
I paid my cleaning lady (yes, my cleaning lady) $15/hr to do it while I was at work. Including time to download memory cards, open and close photo boxes, envelopes, albums, etc, (and clean the bathroom) it took her 40 hrs over 5 days. One week. And 816.6 Gb of memory (in case you were curious).
Just curious…Did you then go back and look at the images to re-name them and organize them? This is the daunting part, I think.
I have been thinking of doing the same thing with my camera. I recently scanned about 150 old photos on a flatbed scanner, named the files in detail, put them into Photo Shop to correct the color, re-named that new file and saved everything again. (Then I sent the ones I wanted to a printing service so I could make photo boards for my mom’s funeral.) Yikes. It probably took me 10 minutes per photo…and two trips to the chiropractor!!
didn’t mean to sound harsh, just explaining
YOU HAVE 2 CHOICES IN LIFE:
1) save time
2) save money
you cannot have both.
sometimes it’s totally worth it to save money. This is not one of those times, as the amount of time required to complete a project like this is utterly egregious.
do the math:
He’s talking about taking an hour a day for 365 days to scan, so that’s 365 hours.
If you paid someone $15/hour to do this work it would be almost $5,500.
time out of pocket: 375 hours
cost out of pocket: $0 + potential loss of all your valuable photos in a fire, etc….
or you can pay a service like scanmyphotos.com under $200 and they can do your entire collection in under 10 minutes, and send it back to you on a dvd.
time out of pocket: 0 hours
cost out of picket: under $200, with no risk of photo loss through fire, etc..
it’s just nuts to do this yourself
Hi Ray — I totally agree. The scanning process takes a lot of work. And life is about making choices that take time or money.
I talk with a lot of retirees who now have lots of time, but often little money. And I also speak to many very successful business people that have more money than they will ever have time. So, for them, thank God for scanning services right! I’m all for scanning services — I think they are great!
But I’d like to bring up a couple points to add to what you’ve put down here.
1) Scanning is only part of the process.
Once the scanning service gives you a DVD or drive with your photos on them, they will need to be imported into a photo manager, and given file names, possibly tagged with keywords, and a “shoot date” needs to be embedded into the metadata, and then all the photos will probably need to be organized into folder or digital albums so they can be viewed in a nice chronological manner that makes sense.
Maybe you or others won’t want to do all of the above, but at least, some amount of labeling and organization will need to take place, and this takes a lot of time as well. And someone can be paid as well to achieve this, but unless they are a family member or friend of family, they aren’t going to know anything about who or what is in these photographs.
So, some view that if a lot of time is being spent doing any number of these, they might as well do the scanning as well, because much of the filename labeling and organizing can all be done at the same time, for example.
Just something to keep in mind.
But more importantly…
2) Scan Quality of Services
$200 is a really low number as an example for how much it would cost. Last I looked, scanmyphotos or a service like it that would be willing to scan 7,000+ photos for that amount of money, is going to be using a very fast automatic feed scanner, not a flatbed scanner that is taking its time to to achieve the highest of quality. And some people wouldn’t want to trust their “heirloom” priceless irreplaceable photos (some very thin and delicate I might add as well) to a high-speed feed scanner.
Additionally, your photos will almost positively not be scanned with the highest bitrate, or with optimal “variable” DPI’s for various paper print sizes, that all amount to high “professional quality” rates. Most services that are this cheap, only offer .JPG files (not uncompressed TIFF), at 24bit and 300 dpi (the minimum dpi really).
Back then, when I priced out my entire photo collection being scanned, before I decided to give it a go myself, I would have needed to spend over $7k to have it done at the quality I was looking for.
So again, just like you pointed out… it’s all about TIME or MONEY. You are so right. And if there’s a third word we should maybe add, it would be EXPECTATIONS.
You can speed up the whole process by buying a few second hand laptop computers and a few more scanners. Have three running at once. Maybe even have a film scanner like a plustec going as well. I have old laptops that are perfectly fine for scanning. It doesn’t use that much cpu power to scan–just dumping the file to the hard drive, not processing. You could cut down the amount of time by running multiple computers and scanners at once. 3 scanners=1/3 amount of time. 4x=1/4 amount of time.
Hi, Curtis.
Thanks for a very helpful post!
Like others, I have thousands of print photos of all sizes (3×5, 4×6, etc.). I looked at Epson V600 and other scanners but am wondering if there photo scanners with feeders that can scan each photo to a separate file, similar to how you can scan multiple documents via a feeder. For example, I would love to put a dozen photos in a feeder and have them turn into say, a dozen JPG files on a computer. Is that a possibility?
Hi Anil. There are a few high-quality feed scanners out there. I’ve tried a couple of the hand-held feed scanners that you can buy at gadget shops for $100-$150, and I was fairly disappointed. They didn’t always feed evenly — many came out crooked. And the quality was always low — JPG and 300 dpi, with often inconsistent image quality each time.
Kodak still makes a really high quality feed scanner that lets you scan at high DPI’s and save in the TIFF format. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are scanning services out there using these scanners.
Check out the Kodak Picture Saver Scanning System scanner models. They are a bit expensive, but if saving time and still maintaining quality is important to you, then this might be the best starting point.
There are great document scanning devices, like the ones Fujitsu puts out, that could work as well. I’ve been fairly impressed with how the quality turns out (in the one I have) considering they are really meant for documents, and can scan photos in a pinch.
And, if you are really looking for the lowest in price, even though I haven’t tested them yet, you might check out the Doxie line of hand-held scanners.
PSA: Remember, with all/most feed-scanners and “delicate irreplaceable” family photos, you want to be very careful which photos you put into them. They have powerful motors that pull them through efficiently and don’t stop until they sense a very noticeable jam — which at that point it might be too late!
Curtis, you’re awesome! Thanks for your detailed/helpful response and for running this blog.
I have finally started my scanning process in earnest. I am taking a two pronged approach. I bought a automatic feed Fujitsu Scansnap IX500. 300 dpi color, 600 dpi BW I am also going to get the Epson V600 or V800. This is for a project to scan photos from the 1800s to present day. It can do 25 pages per minute of color at 300 dpi or you can do color at 600 dpi at a lower speed.
The IX500 has a sleeve that you can use for single delicate douments such as a 10 page letter my Dad wrote to his parents in 1945 after he survived a glider invasion.
For the run of the mill photos, I am running them through the Fujitsu scanner in bulk. While it is mainly a document scanner, you can set the default to JPG and one or both sides to capture notes on the back of photo prints. File naming can be set any way you want with sequential number tagged to what you set up, i.e., 1987-03-Paris-xxx. My process is to take the raw prints and run them through in volume all to a single file folder but with their date ordered file names.
For negatives, negatives, heirloom photos, pasted albums, and other special situations, I will use the Epson scanner I buy with the same numbering scheme. I am not worried about “manually” touching them up at this point just getting them scanned to be able to back up and share. I will use the digital ICE for these pics.
Creating specific albums and printing will be left for the future when I am retired. I have four 40 gallon plastic tubs full of photos on the way from NJ to TX so there is a ton of volume from my parents’ estates to take care of for the family.
I really enjoy this website and the work you put into documenting your processes. Thank you for saving me a lot of research and walks down the wrong path!
On a side note, I am very disappointed that Google has abandoned Picasa, as I found it a great program to use with its ease of creating albums and facial recognition that worked great across peoples ages. I still have it on a PC but worry about sticking with it. The other downside is that the changes and people albums are not easily kept if you move files within a pc or between pc’s.
Since I can not count on any of the online services to be around forever, I am sticking with keeping my picture scans and digital photos on my PC in year and month folders and occasionally duplicated in topic folders and backing them up with Carbonite. Any uploading or hosting on websites such as Google Photos is a secondary process for me not where I keep my main files.
While my scanning is a labor of love with my setup on a Maple Trestle table that my late dad made 60 years ago and we ate from everyday when I was growing up, I do want to actually get this done, hence my using the auto feed scanner for a majority of the prints. Once the table arrives from NJ, my setup will be the fujitsu on the left, mac laptop in the middle, and Epson on the right at this dedicated “workstation”.
Very helpful. By reading your article twice, I ordered Epson 800 last night. Appreciate your time and your knowledge and your encouragement.
Excellent! A v800… Many will be jealous of you for that! 😉
Thank you too for letting me know my website is making a difference in your life. I appreciate that. Cheers! :coffee:
This post made me happy and inspired!! Thanks :))
Thanks Davide! That’s so nice of you to say. I appreciate that! :coffee:
I just did a quick calculation and have a minimum of 9000 photos to scan. (That only includes the photos I considered worthy enough to put in photo albums – I probably have twice as many “unworthy” photos in shoeboxes in my attic and basement!). I am considering purchasing a self feeding, color document scanner for this project. It seems that the Fujitsu Scansnap product is the highest rated product but gets a mixed review for photo scanning. Some people love it and think it does a great job. Others indicate otherwise. It scans at 600 maximum dpi. What are your thoughts?
I think we all have an absurd number of photos that we treasure otherwise no one in their right mind would consider these projects. I purchased an Epson V550 photo scanner off the internet. This scanner does a great job and I save the scanned photos to a file on an external drive. When I get tired of scanning, I go to that file and spend some time identifying each photo. I use the format Curtis suggested except I’m not usually real concerned with the exact date, month and year as well as names are good for me. I try to spend 1 hr. per day and I’m amazed how much I can accomplish. I can also change the setting to scan old newspaper articles and they turn out great. Something to consider. I’m very happy with my scanner. Good luck.
Great to hear Pat! You’re so right. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you just do a little bit at a time, consistently. That’s the trick. You gotta keep to a consistent schedule where you almost feel bad if you have to, or you need to skip a session.
Hi Lisa. I have an older model, the S510, that I use exclusively to scan documents to .PDF. Its fairly aggressive about pulling paper through it. I get jams here and there. No big deal, you just open it up using the button and redo the scan. But, if we’re talking irreplaceable one of a kind photos, you may not want to risk them to these auto-feed mechanical rollers. You could use the clear-see-though-sleeve that comes with them, it’s like a little pouch, but then you have the cover on top affecting the quality of the photo. (Images might be a little soft, not as sharp, and slightly dingy looking)
That being said, I just did a test with it set to 600dpi, lowest compression and used a 3.5×3.5″ photo from 1971 that I’ve already scanned as a test. It does slow down and pull it through slower than documents set at a much lower dpi, and handled it fairly fast. I didn’t use the sleeve, this was straight into the scanner.
Here’s a link to the full resolution file.
So, I think it’s a viable option if you’re okay with trusting your photos to the auto feed, and you are okay with the quality not being as good as a flatbed (that will take its time on a non-moving photo and probably with a higher quality lens), but still very acceptable. My S510 doesn’t allow me to save as .TIFF file. So, you will have to settle for your masters coming out as compressed .JPG files (probably-newer models may let you scan as .TIFF. Not sure). So, make sure you have compression set to the lowest. (In my software, higher means a higher amount of compression, not higher amount of quality)
Hello,
I am uncertain if this website is still active in terms of replying to comment, however, if so, I have a question about scanning time. I just bought a Canon MX922 to replace my HP 2710 purchased in 2005. I did so mainly because I had learned that the image capture is much better on the newer machines even so I was using 600dpi on my HP. However, my main goal was for the photo scanner to be much faster as I, too, have many many photos to scan and not that much time to devote to it.
The image capture was actually quite different than the older machine and closer to the original print. I tested the scan time and it is not faster; in fact, it took 3 min/picture once the scanner warmed up. So, per hour, you can calculate that not many will be digitized.
Any suggestions? Comments? Many thanks!
Wendy, are you still having this problem? 3 mins sounds like a long time. My first thought would be that your DPI is set really high, or that you have an infrared filter such as DigitalICE turned on that is trying to remove scratches from your scanned film. Is that possible?
I realize that I can name a scanned file by date for example 2016 04 18 001 but how do I get the file to go into a program like Windows Live Photo Gallery and take its place in a calendar mode?
I have bins of old photos. If I scan them to computer, how do I organize originals, and which kid gets them after I pass?
By scanning to computer, then I could print albums for each child?
Or should I take the pictures I have taken with phone and iPad have them developed as a hard copy to make the old time albums. I am totally overwhelmed.
Also, when you scan where do you scan it to on the computer iPhoto?
Or take pictures of the originals with iPhone instead of scanning?
I don’t think it would be too bad if I just had a plan of the best practice for this endeavor. Any thought on the best way, would be appreciated.
You have the same problems we all do when attempting to conquer this project! I can only tell you what I’ve done and works for me. Bought an Epson 550 photoscanner off internet. Around $120 and worth it! Has it’s own software you can use. Also have an external harddrive to save pictures to. I organized my photos slightly by event (2nd birthday or time period such as 1950’s) I try to devote one hr/day to project. When I get tired of scanning I rename pictures and use the system described in this blog. I’m usually not concerned with exact date but mostly month and year and names of people in pictures. On external drive I have files named 1960’s and in the folder I have events such as John’s 2nd Birthday. Fairly easy to go through and set up files for each of your kids that has the pictures you want them to have. I’m burning dvd’s when project is done to give my kids their photos. I don’t worry about an editing program most are too complicated and time consuming. You have Windows programs that let you do the basics and that’s all I want. Good Luck!
Thank you so much Pat. It seems like it would work for me also.
Thanks Curtis for a wonderful blogsite with loads of helpful information for someone embarking on digitalising my late mother and father’s collection of photos spanning 77 years until Mum passed away sadly in November 2014. I don’t know how many photos I have, a few thousand. My father was an avid photographer and I just scanned about 100 photos in the last few months. So many things got in the way of this project, not least the fact that I was the executor of Mum’s estate and it took a lot of my time up last year winding her affairs up. I know that the first thing I went in and saved after Mum’s passing were all the family photos that were scattered every where around her apartment and in the car park storage of the retirement village. My aim is to make a photobook celebrating Mum and Dad’s wonderful life together and their family history. I’ll give this to my brother and sister (aiming for this Christmas coming up). Future generations of our family can hopefully get an insight into Mum and Dad and their life, right through to our lives. Even the likeness of facial features is fascinating down the generations.
I am using Apple Photos, had a bit of a glitch when they retired iPhotos, so I had a learning curve transitioning to Photos and iCloud. Also then my hard drive decided to die early this year, luckily I had time machine. Since embarking on this project I am now looking into bootable back ups like Carbon Clone copier.
At first I thought my brother multifunction printer scanner would be good enough for scanning the photos, not wanting to get another piece of equipment. However on doing more research and unsatisfactory results on the MFC I have bought a second hand Epson V33 on eBay. Hopefully it will work well. It only cost me $68 NZD. I am also looking into whether the iPhone scanner apps are any good. I tried the Heirloom app which gave great results but not sure if the company is still operational as there seems to be no reply to their support email. Then I found Photomyne iPhone app which looks very promising as you can take photos of your album pages and it separates out and improves the discoloured photos. Of course they are probably not as good as individually scanning on a flat bed scanner but much faster. At present I’m just doing a test copy of an 8×6 Apple photobook to see how the scanned photos and resolution prints up in the apple printing before I go too far.
Anyway my aim is to scan all the best of the best photos, keyword them and face tag them in Photos, print photobooks, upload them to Smugmug website for future reference, make Smilebox slideshows, make Smilebox collages and make back up copies of the digitalised photos for handing on to my siblings. I’m really enjoying the project, did find it daunting to start with but have cleared the diary for the next few months and have prioritised this project with hopefully a completion date of end of this year.
I would be interested to hear what your view is on all the iPhone scanner apps for this sort of exercise. Sorry I’ve gone on a bit here. Love your site and it’s my weekend reading this weekend…
thank you – We did not know about Photomyne, it works quite adequately for our archiving project. Easy to use and fast.
Thank you for your information. You are very motivating.
Is there a way to scan that it will recognize the size of the photo? There is so much time taken up with cropping out the dead space around my photos.
Hi Michelle, thank you for the compliment — I really appreciate that. :saint:
Yeah, you’re right, manually cropping out photos can be very laborious. For many of us, there isn’t a good enough reason to manually do the cropping, so if you can let the software do it, just let it!
It depends on which scanning software you are using. For example, using the popular EpsonScan, if you switch to the “thumbnail” mode (professional mode), it will automatically crop out your photos from the bed if they are aligned with enough space that it can detect the edges. Other software may call it something else, but will still likely produce the same end result.
sorry but this was more frustrating then helpful, it kept grouping 2 or 3 photos and did not “thumbnail” them. I just want a program that i can scan 6 photos at a time and then “cut” each ones out individually and save as separate photos, so that I am not putting in one photo at a time. I am a person that appreciates simplicity. put the mouse in the top corner click drag and drop
I am so glad to have found your site. It will help me to get motivated to “do something every day”. Have you heard of the Flip-Pal scanner? It is a small scanner that can be taken with you to family reunions, etc. to scan photos there. Or, can be used at home while sitting and watching TV. Very handy and works well. Just a thought.
To scan slides in batch use a Reflecta Digitdata 5000/6000 series scanner. Just put in the whole magazine with 50 slides and come back after 2-3 hours depending on the resolution you have set. The scanner even has dust and scratch removal.
I had to share with you that I was just sitting on the floor with boxes and boxes of pictures surrounding me as I was trying to get started on my scanning journey! My daughter is a senior and I started telling myself over a year ago that I needed to get on this project. Well here we are a few months from her high graduation and I’m just getting started. I decided to google “fast ways to scan a lot of pictures” and I stumbled on this blog. How funny is it that today is Feb 9, 2016 and you started on Feb. 10, 2012…my plan is to start tomorrow :>) …so I thought that must be a sign that tomorrow is THE day for me to get on this dreaded project. Thanks for the inspiration!! #february10
I gave up on scanning my own. Too expensive for the amount I wanted transferred. ScanDigital ended up doing a pretty good job with my materials.
I have mainly photos and some negatives to scan – maybe 300 or so.
What photo scanner do you suggest that will get the job done for under $500 including
good (and compatible) software with touch up features for Windows 7?
Thanks
I recommend using a standard flatbed scanner with a photo scanning software like Autosplitter.
Very helpful and encouraging article. Thank you much for taking the time to write and share your story.
I have been thinking about this for the last 18 years… but I think “just do it!”
I will go online and order the V600 or later model of the scanner after posting this comment! thank you again!
Have a great day!
I recently decided to follow through on scanning my photo collection and purchased an Epson Perfection V600 photo scanner. Yesterday I scanned a series of photos. The first went into my photo library but the others ended up shown on my desktop but I couldn’t figure out how to save them. I got frustrated and gave up but want to try again. Can you point me in the right direction to understanding and using a scanner and then organizing and later sharing photos?
I LOVED seeing the picture of your parents at the World’s Fair. I was a junior and then a senior in high school in New Jersey when the fair was there, and it was a class trip each year. I have lots of wonderful memories of it, and it was fun to share yours.
Hi, Curtis! Thanks for all your scanning tips. However, I am looking for a photo organizing/management software. I know I need to do some sequencing up front before I scan the boxes and boxes that I have found in my mom’s house (of several generations and several branches of the family). But once they’re scanned, I’d like to add some data about date, location, people in the pic, and a caption that I will show up at the bottom of the photo when I create a slideshow and burn CD or DVD for my siblings. Most of the software that’s been reviewed has some of that, but “caption” isn’t mentioned in any I’ve seen. Can you recommend a photo management software that will allow me to query the photo database and create informative slideshows? Thanks!
P.P.S. I just found your post on adding captions. Looks like Lightroom is the solution for me. Thanks!
Hi Sandra. There certainly are a lot of choices now — but you certainly can’t go wrong with Lightroom. It’s certainly one of the best options out there. I certainly hope it works out out for you! 🙂
Hi Curtis
Thanks for sharing =)
Regards.
Thanks Fernando! You’re so welcome. Glad you enjoyed the information. :coffee:
Hi. Do you know how to scan journals too? I have over 20 journals and would hate it if they were ruined by water or anything like that. I have a flat bed scanner and have scanned pictures for my family. Let me know if you have any tips. Thanks.
The hard part comes in the binding of the books. Getting the pages to lay as flat as possible. I’ve done one and I used a scanning software called “Not Another PDF Scanner 2” to batch scan it and I just got each page as flat as possible on the flatbed scanner. I forced myself to do the entire book at once so I could save the entire journal as one PDF instead of a bunch of images. It’s what worked the best for me. The only downside is that I was unable to crop them at all.
The software I used supported saving as pictures and automatically names them in the order that I scanned them. So I could have told it to save as “1942 Jennifer’s Journal” and it would have named all consecutively. Then I could have still cropped and edited the images before then converting all the images into one PDF so they were all together.
I’m embarrassed to ask this but I bought the Epson V550 after reading your information. I think I misunderstood the photo scanning software. I understood that a few photos could be scanned at this same time and would be individual photos in the folder for organizing into different folders later. Am I correct in this assumption? Do they need to be in a TIFF format? Thank You
I don’t know the software that you are using to scan the pictures or the software that comes with the Epson V550 nor the computer. But, I use an iMac and/or a MacBook Pro and software ‘Image Capture’. Image Capture does a reasonable, but not perfect, job and separating out the individual pictures on the scanner and placing the scans of those pictures in a folder of your choice. The output does not need to be TIFF.
Hi Pat. The Epson Scan will let you scan multiple photos at one time, and save them out as separate images. You just have to have it set it in a specific way. In the “Professional” mode, I know if you set the Preview window to “Thumbnail,” you will tell the software to automatically separate the images. Give that a try. You can also alter how much room is saved around the scanned photo in the preferences/configuration settings. I have mine set to “Large.”
Thank you for your help. Worked great! I’m confused on how to get the information previously written on How To Organize your old photos. Sure could use a hint on how to get there. Thanks
Hello Curtis,
I’m looking at the Epson Perfection V800… Would the Epson Scan scan a full tray (12) of 35mm sides in one pass and save them as separate images? Any experience with VueScan with one pass batch scans? Any advise will be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.
Hi Ivan. I’m quite positive, just like the V700 series that the V800 series replaced, you will be able to scan 12 slides at one time. Epson Scan does have a mode called “Thumbnail” that will allow you to scan and save out each image separately in one scanning pass.
Here are the Epson V700 specs as reference:
Epson V700
120/220, 6cm x 20cm (2-6 frames)
4” x 5” film (2 frames)
35mm film strips (4 strips / 24 frames)
35mm slides (12 frames)
Thank you kindly Curtis, I will invest on the V800 and start scanning the Thousands of slides that I have. (Oh Boy…)
Excellent Ivan! Glad to hear. :coffee:
WOW! There is a tremendous amount of info here.
I have about 25 years of slides (over 9,000) and uncounted hundreds of prints to scan.
Back when I was taking slides, I was never too good at editing/culling down to just the “keepers” – so I need to do that first. But I never seem to get passed looking at the slides to decide which ones are worth scanning!!!
I paid to get 500 done at a scanning service – but that gets pricey fast. I also have the Epson V600 and about 2 years ago I scanned 500 of my dad’s old family slides, but then I guess I just ran out of steam. It does take a lot of organization and patience to do this. You seem to have both!
So, I am glad I found this site and hopefully I will get motivated by reading the success stories from others in the same boat!
Hi Curtis,
I started scanning a huge box of photos this week after purchasing an Epson V600. Thankfully I read your very informative article on labeling before I was too far in to my project. Thank you!
I have a series of 1961 black and white negatives and am having trouble getting good images. Could you be so kind as to tell me what settings I should be using?
I have been doing: B&W Negative Film, grayscale, 3200dpi,original target size and using Digital Ice. I insert the negatives then press Preview… Then I need to look at the thumbnail to add the marquee because the normal view cuts them at odd places. Next I push Scan. Am I doing everything correctly? Getting frustrated!
Thanks for any help.
Geri
Wow, just the information I was looking for. I have a stay at home period just starting from a heart surgery operation. My wife and I came up with the idea to get all of those slides and photos into didgital format. Like you I have over 3,000 slides from my time in the Navy during the 60’s and many more from the early 70’s when my kids were growing up. Also about 200 old photos my sister gave to me a few years back when my father moved to a retirement community. Like you, I did research the scan services and came to the same conclusions. A good friend of my suggested that I look at the Epson V600 and a Canon product. In the reviews that I read, it was always the Epson winning. Going to order my Epson on Monday and get started. As i get started and am able to get some number together regarding time and experiences of the process I will leave some posts for you.
Best regards
Steve B
St. Marys, OH.
Hi Steve.
What an excellent plan you and your wife came up with to productively pass this important recovery time. It’s hard at first getting into a rhythm where you feel like you are actually accomplishing something. But, after a few days of working through your new-found routine, you really will get into a groove. And then before you know it, you will be in the hundreds.. and then thousands done!
It’s just so rewarding to finally be on your way with this project. Especially when you discover photos you haven’t seen in years — or ever sometimes! And then as you organize your photos into some kind of meaningful order, something just clicks in your soul and you just become emotionally satisfied more than you will ever imagine.
Yes! Please keep me and this website in mind as you go along! You could either leave your experiences as comments in various posts on my website. Or if you would like, I love taking the words and photos that document everyones’ individual experiences and turning them into guest posts with your name as the writer (email me anytime through my “contact” page at the top of my website if this interests you). Especially ones with photos that people have taken of them and their workflow as they achieve them. We all need encouragement to go on this often challenging journey, so it’s so important we see others accomplishing each step to remind us all it IS POSSIBLE — we all can do this! 🙂
Steve, I do hope your surgery was a success and you have a speedy recovery my friend. And good choice on that V600. 😉
Cheers!
Great blog – it comes very handy for me! 🙂
And so we decided to just do it and bought that canon 9000f mark ii, today. We had that goal for quite a while on our mind. We start with our own collection of about 40*36 Photos plus an unknown amount of diapositives, I guess it will be about 1000 images, too. We’ve been carrying that stuff around for such a long time, without looking at one of the photos…
So we’re ambitious to get things done – there’s also a massive collection of diapositives made by my husbands grandfather who spent four weeks in scandinavia each summer, for a period of 30 or 40 years… And how he loved photography.
I was a bit scared by the speed (slowlyness) of that scanner – ofc we were taking scans with ridiculously large dpi… So I’m just reading your articles and get my mind to getting this task done within a reasonable amount of time. Step by step ofc.
I like your Idea of having a time window. That allows to scan an amount of images each day.
Keep up the good work!
Cheers Sibylle
Hello.
I’m scanning about 3200 color slides 35mm. from my parents, (40 Kodak Carousels with 80 slides each)
Pictures are mostly from the 60’s and 70’s (Europe) in fairly good condition slightly faded and some dust.
Equipment: iMac (Late 2009), Epson V600, LaCie 2Big Network storage.
I have managed to scan a whole carousel (80 slides) in half a day.
Scanning 4 slides at a time on the V600 takes about 12 minutes.
My settings are as follows:
48Bit Color
4800 DPI
Unsharp Mask – Medium
Grain Reduction – OFF
Color Restoration – ON
Backlight correction – OFF (only used on some images with dark shadows, set to LOW)
Dust Removal – OFF
Digital ICE – ON
I set up a timer on my phone to remind me to change the slides every 12 minutes then go on to other things.
If I manage to keep a (fairly) regular schedule it should be done in about 2 months.
Files are saved in JPG format. On average about 5MB storage space each.
Image size at 4800DPI comes around at 6100×4100 pixels approx.
Some folks don’t like Digital ICE, but for me at least it takes most of the pain away from having to remove dust marks in Photoshop.
Hi Ignacio. Your workflow sounds great! I love your use of your iPhone to remind you to change out your slides with a new batch. 😉
I haven’t had much like with Digital ICE on the V600 mainly because I’ve noticed that it’s not near enough to 100% in detecting what is and isn’t dust or scratches. For example, on a set of slides I scanned with telephone polls and wires in the shot, it seemed to mistake the wires for scratches and it tried to remove them. Some of the wire was there, other times it was removed. And sometimes it repairs the areas it thinks is dust or scratches with kind of digital “artifacting” where it’s not nearly as nice as if I had done it in a few seconds with a “clone tool.”
But, for anyone who isn’t nearly as demanding as I am to archive the original as close to the original as I can get, I would certainly think they would agree with you that it really can take away “most of the pain” from having to repair it later in an editor. 🙂
I have 5000+ photos with me and currently I am scanning a few at a time using my Epson scanner. I am able to scan 1 photo in approximately 1.5 minutes at 600 dpi. It seems like little slow but it does produce high quality scans. I also needed to scan my office documents. But the amount of the documents was too much for me to do it alone. So we hired a third party company named Ash Conversions from Weston to do all our scanning jobs at the office. With their own document management software, all my office works are paperless now.
Could you get more specific about how you cleaned the slides for scanning? I am also about to attack my family’s big pile of pictures and slides.
My Great-grandfather was a navy Photographer, Lyman Goodnight (http://navyphoto.net/memorial/goodnightmem.html). He was also really into photographing birds and flowers, so as you can guess, his collection is a part of what I want to save. Also the big part of what I am trying to preserve were from his daughter’s estate (my Grandmother).
So I have taken on the task of scanning what I can find of his photos. I have a 14 MP Ion Scanner for the slides, although I am skeptical as to whether it is really 14MP, but my initial scans seem ok.
But as stated in the beginning, I would like to know the safest way to clean these slides of dust/ect, without damage to the slides. Some of the slides are washed out in the middle for the projector light, but I think there won’t be much I could do about that. I am assuming the best I could do is get one of those bulb-brush thingy that people squeeze to blow air, usually used to clean lenses. I was wondering if there were any safe chemicals that could be used without worrying about damage.
I also would appreciate any tips on scanning Tin-prints. As I have been running across some of these sometimes. The most recent were a set of pictures taken in the early 30ies of the Panama Canal.
Thanks for your time,
Jeremy Catches
Hey Jeremy. Sounds you are off to a rewarding project. I bet you have some really interesting photos considering what your Great Grandfather was privy to with his status. 🙂
Sure, I can tell you a bit about my cleaning. I kind of starting to talk about what I do and which products I use in the middle of this post: My Inspiring Progress Report for February – March 2012. But, as you guessed, basically I use this nice little brush that comes in the Kinetronics Scanner Cleaning Kit to first safely get as much of the standing dust off each side of the slide. I hold each slide up almost vertically and kind of brush down so that I get as much dust off and down to the floor as I can. Then I grab my Giottos Large Rocket Air Blaster and blow each side a few times to get any remaining dust that’s remaining. This won’t get 100%, but it does wonders compared to what’s there before I do this routine.
I tried using compressed air at first — just the kind you can find at an office supply store. I stopped using it quickly as I noticed liquid/moisture hitting the slides occasionally depending on how I held up the can. Even if this was being overly cautious, I decided the expense still wasn’t worth it. The amount of cans I would need over thousands of slides seemed cost prohibitive. So, I went with the less expensive and safer hand-strengthening exercise device. 😉
As far as a safe chemical, the only one I’ve ever seen and read about so far that I would consider using are the PEC products – PEC-PADS (wipes) and PEC-12 (bottled liquid). This is some serious stuff, the kind of stuff you have to be very careful with and use sparingly. It’s a case where more is not better than less. As of the date I’m writing this comment, I haven’t written a post about using it. So, let me link here to a nice little post I read a while back written by Jamie Adams explaining the delicacies of how he used them to clean slides.
Even though I don’t have any tintype photos in my own collection, I believe I do have some information on Tintype scanning. A guy named Art Taylor that comments a lot on this website sent it to me one day when someone asked me for help with them. Let me try and dig that up and if I find it, I’ll email you (at the private link you provided me).
Hello! I have the same question about scanning tin types and would also love to have any information you have on it!
Pamela
I have about 2 dozen tin types and dageurrotypes of ancestors which I would like to preserve. Any info on that topic would be great.
Many thanks.
Amy
Thanks for all the info. Took my 6 boxes of snapshots out in 1990 to start catching up on all my old pictures albums and that week several things happened and the boxes were put back into the closet. What a horrible last 24 years, which is just life, much like a lot of other people have. I count my blessings everyday, things could be worse and maybe we’re going to have some better times now. Everyday comes with New Hope. I could write a book and have given it serious thought. Now 24 years later and I’ve never stopped taking more snapshots, a few with the movie camera. Anyway, anyone can see I’m at a critical point in my life. I’m 74, on oxygen and don’t get out much. So time I do have. I have the time to spend to get my pictures in order, a blessing that so many of you do not have because of having to work. Most of my family says I’ll never get anything done as the amount of boxes of pictures have grown considerably. I love my pictures and now with all the new technology I believe I can get this major project done. We have 4 daughters and I want to complete their pictures and give them to them all neat and tidy and completed. Maybe some collages of their baby pictures then their school days and so on. I think scrapbooking would be nice but I have too many pictures to try that and I think it would be too slow since I am looking for a fast speed ahead plan. I know my computer has a program that came in it that make an album for me and all I have to do is scan my pictures in and then choose which ones I want for each album. I figure I’ll get creative as I go along. I HAVE A QUESTION? Has anyone any had experience with these wand scanners. They would scan a bunch of pictures at one time. Mine are all nice and flat and have kept their color with the exception of the 50 year old ones. They’ve been in albums so they have just faded a little in color. Thank you for any suggestions.
Hi Leah. I bet most of us can certainly relate to your last 24 years. It’s so easy to be down about that — what we haven’t gotten accomplished. I do it myself all the time. But, as you know, all we can do is just make today be better than the last. And for many of us who procrastinate all the time, setting a deadline is often a good idea to make sure we hold ourselves accountable.
Since my website here isn’t really making much money, I really haven’t had the budget yet to acquire a lot of scanners to test them out. I did buy a little handheld scanner that the store Brookstone sold at the time. It was probably similar to what you are thinking of when you say “wand” scanners. This Brookstone scanner had a small motor in it, and as you put the print inside the slot in the front, the motors would pull it in, scan it, and then spit it out the back.
Overall, I was impressed at how fast I could scan photos, but I wasn’t impressed at how often the photo would be skewed with this model. The digital file that the scanner would save would often have the photo be slanted, where corners of information were left out of the scan because the scanner wasn’t pulling the photo through straight and constant. Also, the scanner only scanned 300 dpi, which meant it wasn’t producing as high of resolution scans as I would have liked. Better ones will do the 600 dpi though.
Even though I personally haven’t tried any of them, I remember when I was looking at trying one of these, the Pandigital brand of portable or “wand” scanners got really high ratings from customers on Amazon. So I would start out looking with this brand. They probably do a much better or perfect job of reducing the skew.
Pandigital Scanners on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&field-keywords=pandigital%20scanners&linkCode=ur2&tag=scayouentlif-20&url=search-alias%3Daps
And, what you will see in advertising a lot right now is the Doxie brand of scanners. I would also like to test one of these out some day.
Doxie Portable Scanners on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/doxie/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&linkCode=ur2&tag=scayouentlif-20
So Leah, just know that for convenience, you are probably trading a little bit of quality because the camera lens, motors, software etc won’t be as good as some of the higher quality flatbed scanners. But, if using one of these more convenient scanners actually GETS you motivated to scan, whereas a pricier flatbed hasn’t all this time, then by ALL MEANS start using the best quality of wand scanner you can comfortably afford. Scan at 600 dpi if you can, and if the scanner only scans to JPG files, set it to the highest quality (least compression) to get the best looking photos.
Hope this helps Leah! I commend you for still wanting to make nice albums for your daughters. A program like Picasa on the PC, or iPhoto on a Mac will do a wonderful job to help you make albums for them easily. Just get to scanning! You’ll never regret it. 😉
Cheers!
Curtis
Hi Curtis,
I really enjoyed your post. I will add my own experience
1. I scanned about 12,000 slides from my dad. I described my experience on my blog http://www.e2photo.net/blog/archives/02-2012.html
2. I have also converted 8mm and Super 8mm film (approximately 150 x 50 foot reels) to 1080p digital files. I contracted this work out to http://www.mymovietransfer.com. While their website is a bit weird, they did a credible job. I worked with Gregg who was very helpful.
3. Lastly, I have started a project scanning old photographic prints and this project is the most challenging. My current system consists of the following:
1. Two Macs with the software Image Capture on it. Image Capture does a pretty good, not perfect, job in automatically recognizing the individual prints
2. Two scanners (Epson 2450) and Epson Artesian 835 (Wireless).
I would place pictures on one scanner, start scanning and then move to the second scanner, put pictures on it and then move back to the first scanner. I was scanning at 600 dpi and saving as TIFF files. Today, I did a ‘timing test’ and found I could do about 1.5 to 2 pictures per minute.
Once the pictures are scanned, I import them into a dedicated Aperture library for family print photo where I can sort through them, key word word them and place them into to categories.
These are projects of love.
Regards,
Steven
Hey Steven, your workflow sounds EXCELLENT! 1.5 to 2 pictures per minute is really fast. I tend to have a podcast on or something that slightly distracts my attention. I don’t think I could be listening to anything at all if I was pumping out 2 photos per minute! 😉
Have you considered using Epson Scan with your 2 scanners while scanning prints? I have nothing against Image Capture, but maybe you would like Epson Scan in this case because you can use the “Thumbnail” view on the Preview page and then “Auto Photo Orientation” checked in the configuration settings. This is how I have mine set when I use Epson Scan and it does a really great job of automatically finding and straightening prints and then making separate files out of them. Just thought I would bring in up if you aren’t familiar with it.
After scanning all of those slides with the Coolscan, would you recommend others invest in one over using a flatbed that scans slides like the Epson V600? I’m just wondering how you feel now with this after all of your time spent. The dedicated scanners cost a fair amount of money, but maybe others might be persuaded into spending the money if it’s really worth it — better image quality etc.
And you’re right. These are projects of love. Glad to have met another person who’s on the same journey.
Cheers! Curtis
Hi Curtis,
I will do another run today and see what the throughput is. I typically just listen to music and don’t try to too much. I put as many pictures on the scanner as will fit. Typically it is 2-3, but someones it is one or 6. While one scanner is scanning, I am loading and starting the second scanner. That translates to a significant reduction in time waiting for the scanner to finish. I am not sure whether I would benefit significantly with a 3rd scanner unless I had another person manning it.
I have Epson Scan 3.7.7 and it does not recognize the Epson Perfection 2450. I am using OS 10.8.5, but it has not be recognized for a very long time. So Image Capture was my fall back software. Image capture uses a two pass system. The first pass is an overview where it tries to recognize the individual pictures. If the picture segmentation is good, I just click scan and it automatically scans each picture and dumps it into a folder that I have selected. Occasionally, I have to manually adjust the automatic picture recognition. Generally rotated pictures are captured properly removing the image rotation.
I was fortunate that my step-son loaned me his Coolscan/Feeder for the slide project. Its huge advantage was I could do 25-30 slides at time and the process of loading the slides relatively quick. I could do lots of other things while it was working. Not sure the capacity of the Epson v600, but I suspect that it is less than 25-30 and I also suspect the loading/unloading process is more complex with the flatbed strategy. At least that seemed to be the case when I tried it.
In terms of visible image quality differences, I can’t say as I never did a direct comparison. For my purposes, the image quality was more than sufficient.
Off to start scanning again today.
I did another run of scans this morning. I was able to scan at 600 dpi into TIFF files 143 pictures in 68 minutes. This translates to 2.1 pictures per minute. My goal was to have at least one scanner active at any given moment in time, but with 2 scanners I was to able to achieve that goal. This means that for the majority of the time the limiting step was me loading the scanner. I was a bit slower because the pictures were more curled and placing them on the flatbed was slower. Nice, flat pictures are much easier to work with.
Incredible! You’re the first person that has ever told me about a 2-scanner setup outside of a scanning service. For those that want to get through a lot of prints in the quickest amount of time, but still maintain a high amount of quality, this is definitely a viable option. Thanks for posting your workflow for us to read about!
Reading your experience reminded me of when I started out with scanning. That was in 2007. I had about 7,000 slides to scan, the first of which dated to the late 1940s. And that was just the slides! I was also helping my club with its centennial celebration and people were sending me their photos to scan and return. I was determined, but somewhat overwhelmed.
Fortunately, I researched scanning prior to starting and immediately came upon the notion that I needed to scan in TIFF. Most of the prints I’ve scanned are in TIFF. That worked fine with prints, but not so with 35mm slides so I switched to JPEG. Here are some notes I took at that time.
* 1200 DPI, JPEG, Original size yields a 1 MB file. Four slides take 3-4 minutes.
* 1600 DPI, JPEG, Original Size yields a 1.5 MB file. Four slides take about 5 minutes
* 2400 DPI, JPEG, Original size yields a 3-4 MB file. Four slides take 5-6 minutes.
* 1200 DPI JPG, 4×6 yields a 20 MB file. 5 min/slide
* 2400 DPI, JPEG, 4×6 yields a 70 MB file. 1 slide takes 7 minutes
* 600 DPI, JPEG, 4×6 make a 5 MB file and take 4-5 minutes.
I decided to just do slides of mine that included historical photos of my club. I had them well cataloged in metal cases so finding them was not a problem. Still, it took a LONG time, more than I thought I could bear.
Then one day I saw a sign on the marquee of a local, highly regarded camera store, “10¢ SLIDE SCANS”. WIth that I immediately took in all 7,000. The scans were JPG files, all around 2.0 MB, and 3000 x 2000 pixels. That wasn’t as good as what I was doing, but given my deadline of July 2008, I had to do something fast. I decided to just get the entire slide collection done, and go back to rescan the more important images later. — Still haven’t done that since I’ve go so many old prints to scan, and I haven’t done near enough to catalog everything I’ve got. Your website will help I think. Still, I’m really glad I at least have a digital file for every one of those slides.
For management, I’m using iPhoto, but I likely will be moving to Aperture in 2014, unless further research leads me to believe that is not a good idea. I also keep the original scans in another location. After reading your piece on iPhoto, in which you point out that iPhoto stores originals and enhanced versions, seems I might have too many backups. Still, all it is costing me now is hard drive space. FYI, I also keep everything at CrashPlan in the cloud.
I’ve got nine iPhoto libraries that I manage using iPhoto Library Manager. That works fine, but I’m thinking that with Aperture I can merge them into one file for easier correlation and searches. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.
You had a great idea when you started this website. There are many like us who realize the great things we can do for future generations, while also having a great time ourselves. I hope that from time to time I take a moment to contribute here. I really appreciate your willingness to share your experiences and knowledge.
Thanks!
hi there! Thanks for you info. How did you find the Epson scanner? and what resolution did you scan images at. I have a cubic meter of photos to scan and trying to figure the best way. thanks!
Hi Kezia. You’re so welcome. Glad the information was helpful for you!
I don’t know where you live, so I can’t easily point you to the exact place you should buy one of the Epson photo scanners. I assume that’s what you mean by “find” it.
I have a resource page in the top menu on my website called “Resources” that lists a lot of the products I use with links of where and how to buy them. I would start there first. I list the various Epson models with a link to where you can buy them. I live in California in the United States, and almost zero stores sell these photo scanners. You can only find a model or 2 if you go into an actual photo supply store, and those are even hard to find here in Los Angeles. So, mail order from an internet site is probably your best option.
As far as resolutions I used, I would check out two of my posts I did that talk about resolutions for prints and then another post I did that mentions some suggestions for slides/negatives.
The DPI You Should Be Scanning Your Paper Photographs
Q&A: What’s the Best DPI or Resolution to Scan Your Film Negatives?
Hope this helps Kezia — cheers!