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I have hundreds, no thousands, of old pre-digital photographs which I’d like to scan..... some of these are 35mm slides and some are photos (for which I have most if not all of the negatives.)

I also have a rather old and not very sophisticated slide / neg scanner and some bundled software called Silverfast.

It is anything but fast on my laptop!

Silverfast’s process seems to be to do a pre-scan, then apply filters / corrections etc then a final scan. This takes a long time, especially if the result is not what you wanted.

An alternate path might be to choose a simple scan setting and scan all the photos and apply corrections in Lightroom.

That way I’ll have digital copies of all the photos (although I’ve no idea where I’ll store them yet) and be able to choose the best to post-process.

Has anyone been through this process who can offer any advice?

My father died 28 years ago and left me a box full of colour slides. For the first time ever I opened it last week and looked at a few in an ordinary bright light and then decided it might be worth digitising a few.

I purchased one of these little jobbies

https://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGITNOW-Resol ... nner&psc=1

Cheap and cheerful but did a perfectly adequate job for my purposes and I ended up scanning a couple of hundred, then spent the next few days emailing snaps to contemporary elderly relatives for a trip down memory lane.

I have the scanner...... it's the process that's niggling me. (I may have asked about this before, but I was working then, so had no time.....)

You did - almost exactly 6 years ago to the day ...

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=81001&hilit=scanning+photos&p=1131470&view=show#p1131470

Colonel Panic wrote:You did - almost exactly 6 years ago to the day ...

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=81001&hilit=scanning+photos&p=1131470&view=show#p1131470

I knew I had..... Ironically, I was reading some stuff on the internet about someone who also had similar issues and delayed scanning his photos for 8 years!!

Have to say, that I'm quite disappointed in some of the test pics that I've scanned, but I'm rubbish at photo post-processing!

If it's the occasional paper photos there is a reasonably effective scanner in Google Photos. I've been using it for sharing old snaps with family and it's been good enough for that.

I've been doing the same recently.
I simply scan two or three photos at a time in to folder called "scans of old photos".
The I open the photos in Microsoft office (you could use whichever photo software you have) edit them as necessary (cut and paste/crop to individual photos from the original two or three in the scan) and then create group folders for individual sets of photos (such as Daughter's wedding).
I have lightroom but I can't be bothered to go adjusting the light in every photo; I save that for the odd exceptional one. (I have one I took of Senna.....)

For Android, Google's "photoscan" app works wonders on prints, automatically taking multiple images using the phone camera to eliminate glare, reflections, and even some creases. Not so useful for negatives though.

So I tried scanning some negs and slides yesterday. Results were far better for negs.

I saved them to a CF card to import them into Apple Photos and I couldn’t import them. They weren’t recognised by the app, and when I tried the import option I could see the files, but they were greyed out.

I could however see them in Finder and transfer them to the desktop and import them from there.

I couldn’t see a setting I’d missed that stops reading from the CF card directly in Photos, but there clearly is one!

Still practising.....

T67M wrote:For Android, Google's "photoscan" app works wonders on prints...

The same app is available on iOS also, but for more than the occasional photo it is a laborious process.