Scanning photos

May 25, 2005 5:33 PM

In a effort to allow both of my parents access to the family photos, I have accepted the task of digitizing all of our albums. I have more than 2000 photos I need to scan and wanted to know if anyone has any advice for me. My mum owns a Epson Stylus Photo RX620 for me to use.

I was wondering if anyone knew about any software that might speed the task up, or if I should use the software that came with the scanner? Also, many of these photos have captions written on the back of them, if it isn't too much work I would like to attach these captions to the digital product, but I am concerned that by using those captions as file names I make this task even more difficult, how should I approach this?

Any advice you have for me would be appreciated quite a bit.

posted by herting to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Do you need to have high res versions for archiving or versions just to browse on the web ?

If just lower res for web why not just use a digital camera and tripod . Much faster and the cameras software or flickr/picassa could be used for the captioning.
posted by stuartmm at 6:17 PM on May 25, 2005

I did much the same thing, though not with 2000 photos ... eek.

I used a reasonably generic flatbed scanner for the photo side, then attached the caption data in the JPEGs that resulted. I typed the captions in by hand. It didn't take that much longer than setting the photo up, getting it square, making sure the color balance was okay and so on. For each one. Ick.

As an alternative, if you *trust* them, you could send the photos off to almost any photo lab nowadays, and they'll use their super-fancy hardware to scan it in. Then, when they send back the originals and a CD-ROM with the digital scans on it, you type in the captions by hand.

That'd be the way I'd go for 2000 images.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 6:50 PM on May 25, 2005

Professional scanning may be very expensive, though. Ritz Camera, for example, charges 75 cents a pop for negative scans.
posted by damn yankee at 7:56 PM on May 25, 2005

Ritz Camera is pricing themselves out of the market, then.

http://www.digitalpickle.com/pricing.htm
http://www.digmypics.com/OE/Pricing.aspx
posted by 5MeoCMP at 8:12 PM on May 25, 2005

5MeoCMP, what do you mean by "attached" the caption data? I just finished a similar project at my workplace, and was looking for a way to reliably store caption data within the JPEG file. My understanding is that you can insert data into the XIF header, but I don't know how to insert and then extract it when I want the web album software to display the info.
posted by cosmicbandito at 9:52 PM on May 25, 2005

You might consider buying a scanner that takes stacked stuff (perhaps HP DeskJet combo?) then returning it after doing your scans. Not quite ethical though.
posted by anadem at 7:04 AM on May 26, 2005

Response by poster: cool, thanks for the advice. I can't really afford to send it out for others to do. I'm in the country for another month or so, so this will become an activity where I can piss away all my superfluous time before I go back to school and work.

I contemplated doing the "Best Buy rental," wherein I buy something so that I can use it for 29 days then return, but opted to just do things honestly for once. Also, I think they may recognize my face by now, a couple years ago I was replacing my video card every 4 weeks for about 18 months.
posted by herting at 3:33 AM on May 27, 2005