6
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 recently helped a parent do this with ~1k in albums, frames, and with a variety of media spanning about 100 years.
About half were done with Capture (which partners with Costco) which appeared to be both better priced and reviewed than alternatives (e.g., ScanMyPhotos, ScanCafe, DigMyPics). They handle albums in addition to loose photos, and separate things based on the label/container they're sent in.
Album transfer
Photos -- $15.99** for the first 50 photos, $0.28 per photo after first 50
For the ones I did personally, originally I'd looked at ADF scanners, but with the variety in size and frailty/sensitivity of some of the photos that seemed to not be a good option. For framed photos I also tried scanning with a phone, and that worked surprisingly well for a number of them, but glare was an issue. I tried fixing glare using a polarized film and lens but my photography/art skills are solidly kindergarten level... so others might get that to work well, but I didn't. Not being able to trust that a scan would be good killed that as an option so I ended up taking them out of the frames.
For scans I used an Epson V39 II flatbed scanner on 300dps. Partly for speed, and my rationalization was the print dps was probably a good deal lower anyways... plus making it look good/faking detail with AI is just going to get better.
The software it came with could automatically split photos so I could scan at least 3 at a time. When I got in a rhythm it'd take about 15 seconds per set, swapping the next as it reset.
It would get confused on whether it was a document with older photos, though, which slowed things down a lot. I also decided to manually deskew/rotate during the scanning process since the software was decent enough.
There's software out there for cropping/deskewing (ImageMagick), scanning (NAPS2 on Windows), or other procressing, but from my limited experience/needs I preferred just doing it manually.
All told it took probably ~6 hours for the ~500 I scanned, with some processing. File names autoincrement and when I finished a category/album I'd move it to a descriptive folder and move to the next. It's the sort of thing you can just do a little bit at a time, so it might be worth considering if there's no time constraints?
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.
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.