7
votes
Photo digitizing
Hi all,
I've got (probably) a few thousand family photographs that I plan on scanning/digitizing. These photographs are organized into dozens or hundreds of envelopes with month/year and sometimes event description written on them. I'm on the fence between using a service to do it or DIYing it with a scanning machine.
The way I see it is -
Service pros:
- I don't have to do it myself
Service cons:
- I may have no control over how the digitized photos are tagged or organized (date tagged, filename)
- Risk of photographs being lost/damaged
- $$$$
DIY pros:
- I can tag and organize the photos exactly how I want
- Much less expensive
DIY cons:
- I have little spare time and this project could be extremely time consuming.
I would love to hear if anyone here has experience doing this and what techniques or pitfalls you may have discovered along the way.
Probably not feasible for the amount of photos you have, but I recently digitized about 100 photos I had lying around. My scanner maxes at 600 DPI, adjusting various other settings still did not produce as good a quality import as Google's PhotoScan app. In case that interests you.
I've been doing this all by myself for the past few weeks. I have about a thousand of photos and I'm scanning every single one of them without any exceptions.
I bought a Canon LIDE 400 flatbed scanner just for this purpose and it works surprisingly well. Depending on their size, I can put three photos on its bed and it scans all of them at the same time. It then splits them without me interfering with anything.
I thought about using a service myself but I simply could not trust them not to lose the photos. One thing I did not anticipate before started doing all of this is how rewarding it'd be to just look at these photos again. They brought up so many memories that I had completely forgotten and it continues to be an invaluable experience. It also what takes up most of my time because scanning the photos themselves, assuming you won't be dealing with detailed tagging or organization at the same time, is faster than you'd think.
My late grandfather left behind boxes and boxes of 35mm slides, and we're working our way through digitizing those. It definitely takes time, but it doesn't all have to be done at once and it doesn't have to be the only thing you're doing. Scanning pairs really well with watching TV or company-wide video calls that you have to be on but don't require your full attention.
I guess my point is that you might find it more manageable if you looked at it as "Could I squeeze in scanning 20 pictures sometime this week?" instead of "When am I going to scan 2000 pictures?"
I think this answers it. Throw some money at it and make sure they're scanning them all in order. In each envelope put a recipe card with some sort of identifying information for that set. Ask them to also scan those just in case they give you a big fat folder of images.
If you do scan yourself, I'd get a second to help. Get a network scanner so you basically stand at the flatbed and push the files to a shared folder where the second person organizes the incoming files. It'll take a long time and.... well, you save a little money but the benefits end there.
I'm in the same boat so please do share your experience with whatever option you go with and whomever you go with.
Depends if you have access to a scanning machine like a ScanSnap. It would not be worth buying one for this project (unless I’m dramatically underestimating the cost of the scanning service), but if you don’t have a ScanSnap, I imagine scanning all those photos individually with a printer will take an eternity. If you do have access to a ScanSnap or similar, you could probably scan them all in a day.