Organising and scanning photos and slides.

[PaulB]

Not quite a new year's resolution, but probably as close as I'll get to one.

We have quite a lot (many hundreds) of photos and 35mm slides taken before the advent of digital photos. I keep saying that some day I'll scan them, but the size of the task and the mechanics always seem to put me off. (They may well do again so I'm after a bit of advice.....)

Firstly, an easy one.... scanning the photos. What sort of settings on my scanner will give a reasonable compromise between resolution and file size? These are just holiday snaps and are not in anyway professional.
They would be mainly displayed on screen... I can't see any being massively enlarged, although some may benefit from a bit of cropping. Would I be best scanning the photos or would scanning the negatives give significantly better results in return for the (I guess) extra time involved?

Now to the slides.... the same questions with regards resolution all apply. The next question is how to achieve it. You can buy expensive slide scanners, but this is by definition a once only process. Some flatbed scanners have a slide adapter (mine doesn't), and then there's this home made, slightly Heath Robinson affair fromthe Guardian a year or so back.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... tal-images

Being a "Blue Peter baby", I'm tempted to have a go and make one of those even though there's no sticky backed plastic involved!

Finally, when I've got all my masterpieces digitised, how should I store them for posterity? I'm currently on a Mac and use iPhoto, but I find it's organisational capabilities somewhat limited. I guess that I could keep them in a separate library, perhaps on a separate disc. I have a terabyte USB disc somewhere. The alternative is Flickr, or Picasa, or use some of the 50gb storage that I seem to have with box.net.

All suggestions welcomed.

Thanks and have a HNY, one and all!

[vintage ATCO]

I have a flat bed scanner with a device that holds several slides but it is fiddly to say the least. If you have a large number of slides to do then I would suggest you have them done professionally. It would save an ordinate amount of time but I have no idea of costs.

I found the biggest problem with slides is dust. No amount of cleaning helped and I spent hours photo editing the dust spots off. Not so much a problem with prints.

As for settings, you need to experiment and strike a balance between dpi and file size. If you want to be able to make prints from 35mm slides then you need to scan at quite a large dpi. Again experiment.

For cataloguing on a PC I use Google's Picasa, never found anything better. I do upload some stuff to Picasa, Flickr and Photobucket but don't look upon those as storage. I keep five backups, one of which is always off site.

[vintage ATCO]

Incidentally, when I retired I stated one of my first jobs would be to scan all my slides and photos. That was five years ago and I haven't started yet . . . .

[PaulB]

I found the biggest problem with slides is dust. No amount of cleaning helped and I spent hours photo editing the dust spots off.

I've read that dust is a massive issue.

"Professional" scanning could get costly for the quality of the photos involved. They really are just happy snaps.

[kingjame]

I found the biggest problem with slides is dust. No amount of cleaning helped and I spent hours photo editing the dust spots off.

I've read that dust is a massive issue.

"Professional" scanning could get costly for the quality of the photos involved. They really are just happy snaps.

You could trying hiring a device, a quick google brings up this as its top search
http://www.scannerhire.co.uk/home-use/s ... -hire.html

[Skyhawk-N]

.

[Sharpie]

21,000 Skyhawk That'll be keeping you busy during an English winter!!

I had only 3,500 to do..

I found that 300 dpi was a good medium resolution, gives you a decent image with a file size of only about 300k. I did scan some of my best slides at 1200 dpi which gives a size of about 3 - 4mb.

Dust certainly is the big issue, which is why I didn't use a batch processor. I actually purchased a Epson RX620 general printer which has a slide holder for the scanner and that worked really well. I just cleaned each and every slide and did it manually a couple of winters ago. To clean them I used a camel hair brush and then blew them with a jet of compressed air from a can.

There was a thread about this a while back...

[PaulB]

There was a thread about this a while back...

There was.... I was hoping that technology might have moved on. (Which it may have but DPI remains a fixed thing and dust remains inevitable!)

[kingjame]

You could trying hiring a device, a quick google brings up this as its top search
http://www.scannerhire.co.uk/home-use/s ... -hire.html

£300 to buy one outright, or £55/wk to hire one? Much, much more expensive to hire.

I bought a slide scanner as I have around 21,000 to scan, scanning them is definately a labour of love.

Cheapest I saw a Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner for was 680 from Google shopping. That's almost 7 weeks of hire before the discounts they seem to give. It also sounds like it is close to fully automatic once the feeder is loaded.
Was only a suggestion