Scanning Old Photos During Down Time!

[menzies]

Since travel and boating has been severely curtailed I have been pulling together all of the "paper" photographs and letters we had stored all over the house. Many going back to the seventies and beyond. And many air mail letters from family to us when we moved here in '86.

I dumped thousands of duplicates (remember when you used to buy two copies of everything) and out of focus photos (pre-digital when you didn't know how crappie the photo was!).

Sorted the photos that were left into logical groupings and bought a high-speed photo scanner.

It has taken over two months off and on, but I finally got the photos done (letters next). Copied them on to DVDs and to thumb drives. God only know what the storage medium will be when we pass and the children get the files!

Anyway, 3,521 photos scanned and filed.

At some stage I need to collate all of my digital photos that are currently stored across three internal and three external drives and get them into groupings that make sense and have those moved off line too. I started digital photography in 1999. That is going to be a MAJOR undertaking! Maybe if we don't get to the Bahamas for our usual three months this year.

Anyway, here a pic of me on the foredeck of our boat in June of 1975. The spinnaker was up and the Genoa was partially raised to catch some extra breeze. I was having a nap as it was a 30 mile spinnaker reach from Tory Island to the mouth of Lough Swilly and we had gone around Tory in pitch dark where it was all hands on deck and alert - no fancy electronics in those days!

 

[Capt Jack]

This is a great idea. What hi speed photo scanner did you use?

John

 

[skyhawk]

I've been slowly going through my digital photos trying to cull out all the duplicates, eyes closed, bad shots, out of focus, etc....
It's amazing how many of those I ended up with. Not long ago I went through my huge box of film negatives and prints form yesteryear. Ended up tossing maybe half for the same reason!

I tried scanning photos some time ago with less than stellar results. problems with reflections, etc....
I found that google has a pretty good tool for scanning photos with a smart phone, but it requires 5 clicks for every photo so it takes a really long time. it stitches the images together cancelling out the reflections.

 

[alormaria]

I've been doing the same thing but my early photos were all slides. I got a cheap slide/negative scanner from Kodak and I'm living the dream. Damn, I used to look good.
I'm finding Ektachrome did not age well. Kodachrome seems much more stable as is Agfachrome and Anscochrome.

 

[kthoennes]

Great photo. I wish had lots of downtime just to clean off my stack of dead cell phones. Off-loading the memory cards was easy, but the long text message and photo strings take much more time. Some save worthy, lots of deletions, but boy those text (and photo) strings with friends and family are a mile long.

 

[Glastron CVX20]

Anyway, 3,521 photos scanned and filed.

Post some more up old chap!

 

[GoneDiving]

I never had any luck scanning slides at home and in the end resorted to outsourcing to professionals. $$$ but very happy. Paper based photos can be much easier. Now document feeder fax/scanners give surprisingly good results and are set and walkaway

Don't forget to backup backups. Don't ask me how I know that you will be VERY pi$$ed if after all that work your HD crashes and you lose most of them.

Agree on post more oldies��

 

[catalinajack]

About a year ago my sister came across a box of black and white large format (3.25" x 4.25") negatives. My dad had been an avid photographer using a Speed Graphic press camera. It seems my mom had put them away after dad passed away at an early age. They were discovered after my mom had passed away. She had no idea that she had them. We think they were in that box unknown for almost 50 years. I purchased an Epson Perfection 850 scanner which I used to scan the negatives most of which were from 1946 to 1960. A few were damaged from heat. They were crinkled, not even close to flat but the scanner still produced a good images. The pictures? Well, there were many classic, long lost photos. It was well worth the time and expense. It was exciting to see each each negative appear and turned into a fine black and white photo. Because the negatives are so large, they produce very sharp images. I have attached just one, one of the worst damaged negatives. I am still amazed that the scanner was able to get anything from this negative. That is I in the middle.

 

[CaptTom]

Scanning is the easy part.

The key is to organize them in a way that makes sense to you, and makes retrieval possible.

We're very thankful that my mother always noted the date, names and places on the back of all photos she had printed. This doesn't seem to happen today with digital photos.

Just about every digital photo tool nowadays just wants to merge all of your photos into one big "pile" and sort them by date. That's useless. You need to organize them in folders, and tag them, first with meaningful file names and then using any tagging options your software allows (although that might be proprietary and therefore, transient.)

What's worse, most people don't do any curating of their digital photos. Post them on Facebook and in a few days they're gone, never to be seen again. Remember MySpace? All the other end-all and be-all "internet portals" before that? Yeah. FB is temporary.

Baking them up to a local file server (NAS) and/or to the cloud is essential. I think CD/DVD media is already becoming a thing of the past, and USB memory sticks are not really safe for long-term storage. I much prefer some sort of "live" storage like a computer, NAS or cloud.

When new storage technology comes along, it'll be easy to transfer them over. I doubt anyone in the year 2050 will want to, or even have the hardware to, copy them all from optical or USB media.

 

[twistedtree]

Scanning is the easy part.

The key is to organize them in a way that makes sense to you, and makes retrieval possible.

We're very thankful that my mother always noted the date, names and places on the back of all photos she had printed. This doesn't seem to happen today with digital photos.

Just about every digital photo tool nowadays just wants to merge all of your photos into one big "pile" and sort them by date. That's useless. You need to organize them in folders, and tag them, first with meaningful file names and then using any tagging options your software allows (although that might be proprietary and therefore, transient.)

What's worse, most people don't do any curating of their digital photos. Post them on Facebook and in a few days they're gone, never to be seen again. Remember MySpace? All the other end-all and be-all "internet portals" before that? Yeah. FB is temporary.

Baking them up to a local file server (NAS) and/or to the cloud is essential. I think CD/DVD media is already becoming a thing of the past, and USB memory sticks are not really safe for long-term storage. I much prefer some sort of "live" storage like a computer, NAS or cloud.

When new storage technology comes along, it'll be easy to transfer them over. I doubt anyone in the year 2050 will want to, or even have the hardware to, copy them all from optical or USB media.

All excellent points.

What software have people found good for image cataloging? I have been using Adobe Lightroom, but absolutely hate the subscription licensing that many big companies are forcing you into. So I’m looking for an alternative.

 

[CaptTom]

What software have people found good for image cataloging? I have been using Adobe Lightroom, but absolutely hate the subscription licensing that many big companies are forcing you into. So I’m looking for an alternative.

I admit I'm a bit of a minimalist. But for me, just putting them in a folder/directory structure does 90% of the organizing. For example, my "boating" sub-directory has 59 directories, many of which have their own directories.

I download the photos to a "temp" folder where I go through and delete the blurred, duplicate or otherwise unwanted photos. This is a key step! It's way too easy to get lazy and just copy them all, hoping to review them "some day."

Finally, I use a Windows program called "Advanced Renamer" to give them meaningful names, which include the date and some other information I might one day search for. The program lets you rename files in bulk, and even remembers the last renaming template you used each time you re-open the app.

I should really go through and tag photos with even more information, like the names of everyone in the shot, but never seem to get around to it. Some of the cloud services will auto-tag people using face recognition, but I'm reluctant to give them even more personal data about my friends and relatives.

 

[GoneDiving]

Just about every digital photo tool nowadays just wants to merge all of your photos into one big "pile" and sort them by date. That's useless. You need to organize them in folders, and tag them, first with meaningful file names and then using any tagging options your software allows (although that might be proprietary and therefore, transient.)

Most cameras and phones now have the option of writing meta data that includes location, date and camera that took the original photo. Often this can be included on scanned images too. My phone has the ability to auto sort along these lines, giving me files of "2018 Japan" for example.

It's far easier and quicker to do this while the images and being created/scanned than it is to go back and do it piecemeal afterwards.

 

[CaptTom]

Most cameras and phones now have the option of writing meta data that includes location, date and camera that took the original photo. Often this can be included on scanned images too. My phone has the ability to auto sort along these lines, giving me files of "2018 Japan" for example.

Date is usually also part of the file name, and it's on the file modified date, too. Camera, exposure settings and the like aren't really helpful for organizing photos. Location can be helpful - if you have a way to display, search and sort it. But it's a security risk if you publish or send the photos anywhere. I keep that option turned off. Far easier to understand the place name I give it than a lat/long anyway.

That said, it's certainly possible to take advantage of the meta data in the file by adding your own values. The problem is an inconsistent use of this data across software platforms. You risk putting a lot of effort into tagging photos with data that some future programs won't recognize.

Obviously, most people don't take the time to organize their photos, so all the popular software makes a one-size-fits-all effort to do it for you. The problem is, keeping it super-simple makes it much less useful. All the products I've tried "dumb it down" so far that I find their approach unhelpful.

 

[BruceK]

Wonder how Menzies, the thread starter, is progressing with "Scraping Paint". Back to sound steel yet?

 

[Insequent]

He may have gone beyond scraping paint, he appears to be a Guru now.