I thought this had been covered here before, but I can't find the thread. I may undertake scanning my grandmother's photo albums which are numerous and old. I think it would be ideal to either scan entire pages at a time without removing photos from the album, or using a hand scanner.

Is there a product (hardware and/or software) that anyone can recommend for this project?

1. Hand scanners are bad.

2. Removing the photos from the album is good. Because:

2a. Scanning through the plastic would be bad. The focal plane for the scanner assumes the photo emulsion is touching the glass. Scanning without removing photos from the album will result in more blur than if you just did it correctly to begin with.

2b. Removing the photos from the album will allow you to make an attempt at blowing dust off the photos, as opposed to scanning whatever dust happens to be trapped under the plastic sheet.

2c. Processing time for each photo, and file sizes, will be smaller and more manageable if you remove the photos from the albums and do them individually.

2d. Each individual photo will need different amounts of tonal correction. Might as well start them off as separate files instead of having to split them up anyway.

3. Plugins are good. Favorite one: "Focus Magic". Look it up. Also, Ulead Smart Saver is very good at interactively controlling your JPG quality level when saving.

4. This is a huge pain in the ass job. If grammy isn't paying you, tell her to take the photo albums to a shop that specializes in that sort of thing.

5. Someone please link the thread where we were image-correcting someone's old scans. That was cool.

I agree with all that Tony said. I've done the 'Scanning the parent's photos' project and believe me...

1) Ok, it seems like a great idea just now BUT; the novelty wears off after a couple of hours/minutes/seconds. And once you've told Grandma you'll do it, you need to finish the job!

2) All your hard work probably won't be appreciated in the slightest. They'll still look at, and use the album and ignore the scans!

3) You need to scan them one at a time for the reasons Tony mentioned.

So unless theres a real need to do all these scans, I'd be inclined not to do it yourself - pay a younger nephew or something to do the boring repetitive task for you!

If I should take the photos out of the albums, would a sheet-fed scanner be faster than a flatbed? I have a flatbed (correct term?) scanner, but it's slow.

I have a SCSI HP Scanjet IIcx stored somewhere. That's faster than the Canon I have now, but it's obviously much older and its advertised resolution is lower. I think it was 400x400 back in the early '90s when it also cost $1700. Is that high enough?

It would be to put the whole lot online.

After thinking about what you and Tony said, maybe I don't want to do this myself. I will see about finding a shop to do it, but I'm still open to taking this on.

I'd suggest scanning a selection yourself - using both scenners for quality comparison. See how long it takes to scan, crop, tidy-up each photo. You'll soon get an idea if its for you. Once you've found the settings you're happy with, the hard work is done and you just need to set aside time each day to get it finished. The key is not to make yourself sick of it - maybe do 10 a day. How many does she have?

I think Dignan undertook something similar not so long ago. There was a thread with software recommendations, plug-ins and batch image processing tools. Maybe it wasn't him :S If it is, he'll chime in soon

It's thousands of photos. I can't give a better estimate than that.

There's no time crunch and I haven't even told her I would do it, so it's not an issue if this takes a while. Going through one album per week seems doable, but I would probably go even slower than that.

I don't even think Grandma wants this. There are others in my familty that probably do though.

See also: The Exciting Adventures of OCD Archivist and scanning.

Edit: whoops; did that backwards

(Links don't work - just take me to this page. Copy/paste works fine)

Edit: Links are ok

Does anyone know how much a professional charges for this sort of work? I wouldn't mind paying even 50 cents per image if the results were very good.

Otherwise, for anything you also have negatives of, scanning those in batches would be a better bet. I doubt there are negs in Rob's case.

I've got maybe 1000+ of my own printed photographs that I'd love to scan someday. And probably another 1-2K that my parents have.

I cam across this:
http://www.digmypics.com

Their prices seem very reasonable, but I wouldn't send photos through the mail. Too risky.

They appear to be located by me. Not sure how you'd get them to me without mailing, though. Guess that doesn't solve anything. :P

I don't see how it saves time to take out the pictures and scan them in individually.

Tony's suggestion was made on the assumption that you were going to color-correct and do some tweaking on each (or at least a significant number) of the photos.

Your HP IICX is a good scanner, I think it runs at 600 dpi. The main thing about it is it is FAST. I can scan a full 8x10 color picture at high resolution in about 6--8 seconds with mine.

tanstaafl.

My wife has one of these Epson all-in-one scanner/printer/fax things. The scanner software is smart enough to detect if you have multiple images on the flatbed and separately crop and process them. Your own scanner software may vary, of course.

My advice: scan whole pages at a time, possibly removing the plastic if and only if it's not glued down such that you can't remove it in a non-destructive fashion. You don't need terribly high resolution, but if you can get 16-bit TIFFs instead of normal 8-bit images, that will be a big bonus for you later on if/when you want to do image cleanup.

Then, once you've got your pile 'o pictures, you've got two important tasks: metadata and cleanup. You need to get grandma to actually look through the pictures and tell you who everybody actually is. For cleanup, I'd say to run everything, in bulk, through something like Picasa's "I'm Feeling Lucky", and save Photoshop for the good ones where you really want.

Ancient black-and-white will actually come out quite nice. The nasty, awful pictures are the ones printed on early color paper (1950's or so). Those are all faded and brown. I recently put some serious Photoshop energy into cleaning up a few of them. Auto-Levels gets you close, but surrender on getting any useful shadow detail, much less decent color balance.

Slightly OT (I hope you don't mind, Rob!), but I've got a question that I hope can be answered quickly-
I have hundreds of 35mm color negatives from years past that were supposed to be organized, printed several times over, and compiled into albums.
The digital age brought me the concept of doing the album work entirely without the printing exercise and I bought a scanner that had an attachment for negative scanning, but the quality was horrible and I was put off by that and the daunting task of organizing it all.
I'm back to step one- finding a way to get digital images from the negatives. Is this something that I should just get done through a local drugstore? They still do that at drugstores, right?
I remeber something about Kodak providing a 'photo CD' of your developed film roll. I don't have any experience at all with that option.
Anyone here have a word to say about negative to digital possibilites?

Thanks!

the ONLY real way that I've found to truly archive any type of roll negative or slide film is to buy a very nice (read: $2000) slide/negative scanner, such as a Nikon CoolScan and do the process by hand.

A slide takes about 40 seconds and a roll of 4 color negatives would take a minute or so. It's a long arduous process that can't really be beat.

Photo CDs were fairly nice high-res digital photos in a slightly lossy format known as Image Pac in resolutions up to 4096 x 6144 (25 megapixel) but more commonly 2048 x 3072 (6.3 Mpx). The new Kodak product is "Picture CD" and provides you with 1024 x 1536 (much more lossy than Image Pac) JPGs (1.5 Mpx).

I imagine you should be able to take your negatives to almost any Kodak lab (at a drug store, for example) and have them "printed" to Picture CD. I don't think anyone does Photo CD any more. You could also try a 1-hour photo place or a real photo processing lab.

Thanks, guys- your comments have inspired me to do some rudimentary searches on wikipedia (can't stay away from that place) and googled enough to find that several companies are set up to service the 'film negative to digital image' market.
I'll just mosey along now and see if there's anything nearby or that looks closest to what I'm looking for.
Thanks again!

I had a couple of Photo CDs made many years ago. In fact, I think I still have them somewhere. Great quality pictures at massive resolutions, never managed anything as good myself. I remember having to wait 2 weeks to get them done and then having to buy a multisession CD-ROM drive for my Risc PC just to read them. Ah, those where the days!

It's a shame if they don't offer the service any more. Then again if people are happy with low resolution transfers then there's no point getting picky. I'm sure there are plenty of idiots running round taking pictures with 350Ds and the like, who wouldn't know a well framed and exposed picture if it slapped them in the face!

There was a small amount of talk in this thread as far as hardware goes. I think Rob said he has a IIcx. I think I also have that model, although I no longer have a way to hook it up.

What would everyone recommend today as far as scanners go? Scanning slides is a must, in addition to photos and other things. A feeder is not important. Lastly, if the cost could be around $100 that would be good. Any ideas? There was an HP 4070 in CompUSA today for $90, but they had none in stock and it doesn't really seem available online.

Don't pretend that you can scan slides in a flatbed scanner. If you want to do slides, get a dedicated slide scanner. For other tasks, get a flatbed or sheet-feed scanner, as appropriate. That said, one of the Nikon CoolScan products would seem to be at the knee of the quality / price curve. If you need to squeeze every last drop of quality out that the Nikon would miss, then you can shell out, per slide, on professional drum scans (but only for the ones that you actually care about).

With respect to PhotoCD, I paid $1/frame for these things for everything I shot from about 1993 to 2000 or so, when I switched to a digital camera. When processed by Kodak, the quality control was piss poor. I was always putting elbow grease into dust spots, water spots, and so forth. There used to be third-party labs that charged maybe $1.20/frame that had better quality control. PhotoCD always had a sort of "haze" about it, but you could easily work around it by adjusting your levels. If I was to shoot film again, I'd probably shoot slide film and see if I could get it processed and scanned all at the same time. The price is high enough that it's pretty hard to justify relative to current digital cameras...