digital photos scan resize resolution freeware frame

May 30, 2009 11:01 AM

Seeking software for scanning old paper photos into digital format. I'm hoping to find something that will automatically crop to borders of the photo so I don't need to manually crop every one in Photoshop. Bonus points if it will automatically resize all the scanned images into a specific resolution size.

Mom's birthday is Wednesday and I have a digital photo frame. I'm planning to spend part of the weekend scanning old family photos from albums and saving onto an SD card to use in the frame. There are dozens, possibly a couple hundred, photos. I don't have nearly enough time to manually crop and resize every single digital pic so I turn to you, o' wise MeFites for guidance! My scanner is a Canon MP600, the frame is an 8" Matsunichi PF800M with 800x600 pixel resolution, and I have Photoshop CS4, but I'd rather not use Photoshop since it's much too slow and complicated for the simple stuff I need to do. I just want something quick and easy that'll let me hit "scan," and tah-dah! I'll have frame-ready photos in a flash. I prefer something free (or very cheap) that I can download from online since I need it right now. Does such a beast exist?

posted by cuddles.mcsnuggy to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I'm an idjit. Ignore the fact that I put the tags in the title field for this question. (sigh.)
posted by cuddles.mcsnuggy at 11:02 AM on May 30

Most modern scanner software has an option to automatically crop on scan. Example: I have a CanonMP210. I can lay 3 photos side by side (with a gap in between), scan and get 3 separate images. If you acquire the images in photoshop, it should open each as an individual image, nice and cropped.
posted by zerokey at 11:09 AM on May 30

echoing zerokey. My HP scanner will crop automatically and save to file pretty painlessly. If you're concerned about the image's dimensions, I'm sure that a PS script could do what you need, or you might try something like FastStone to batch convert to 800x600.
posted by boo_radley at 11:17 AM on May 30

The resizing is the easy part, since there is no manual work involved. I've used IrfanView to do batch resizing and it's free.
posted by smackfu at 12:33 PM on May 30

Have you tried using crop and straighten in Photoshop (File/Automate/Crop and Straighten)? You can cover the scanners scanning surface with photos, scan, the bring the scanned image of the photos into Photoshop and run C&S. Running C&S will cut each image out and then place it in it's own file.Then record an action to resize your images 800x600, save and close.
posted by doctor_negative at 1:40 PM on May 30