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Old 10-12-2012, 08:47 AM   #41
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I've chosen to save my old photos in hi-res JPEG format. They are stored on a removable hard drive at home and on flash drives that I keep in our safe deposit box. Saving them on a cloud application like Picassa also makes sense.

My view is that pictures are going to be viewed on a monitor of some kind. I'v been to two travel photo events recently at friends houses and they both displayed their photos on their flat screen TV's. You should experiment with the files settings and then put them up on a large TV to see how they look. Things should only get complicated if you plan to print your pictures in formats of 8x10 or larger for wall display.

I would assume that digital files need to be maintained over time. That means rewriting DVD's every couple of years. Also, rewriting files on hard drives and portable drives. This will also let you check your file format compatibility with the current software. Digital format is probably not write once forever and then forget about it. Film negatives and photos can last longer but that is very dependent on the printing technique at the time and the storage conditions.

Annotating photos in Photoshop is not very practical. I've got Photoshop CS 5 and it still isn't convenient. PowerPoint has been suggested. If you do this then you should save your photos in lower resolution because the PowerPoint files can get very large very fast.

Something I've begun to do lately is to create videos with my photos. You can mix and match still photos and videos. Annotation is supported in the software. You can add music. I then post the results on YouTube. I'm using IMovie right now but I have used a very capable $95 program on my PC in the past.

The problem is when you try to distribute the digital photos to older family members who aren't computer/internet savvy.

Also, be selective about the photos you save. It's still a lot of work.
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Old 10-12-2012, 09:10 AM   #42
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The problem is when you try to distribute the digital photos to older family members who aren't computer/internet savvy.
Maybe you could just put the jpgs on an SD card and put the card into one of those photo picture frames, that goes from one to the next. Then send them the picture frame + card. That way they wouldn't even have to turn on a computer in order to see them, even though they wouldn't see the annotations.
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Old 10-12-2012, 09:11 AM   #43
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(snip)What, if anything, will be left of digitized photos 100 years from now?
Let me put a question, what would be left of paper photos after a couple of generations of sorting as things are handed down? Once folks no longer know who the pictures are of then they might well be put in the trash.
That is true of photos, and equally true of digitized pictures. Disks, where you can't see the contents without the right hardware and software, are perhaps even more vulnerable than a book. With a book, at least it won't be discarded because nobody can tell what it is. And the other nice thing about a photo-book is that in many of them you can add text alongside the photos, giving a description of who, when, and where. That's why I think the book would be a big improvement over a typical photo album with unidentified photos. A caption will hold a lot more information than a file name, too.

It's true that there may come a time in any family when there's nobody in that generation who is interested in genealogy. I think it may be possible to donate copies of ones materials to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. If so, I'd be inclined to make a second copy of each photo-book, and send it off there, where it would be safely stored until perhaps an interested descendant comes along in another generation or two.
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Old 10-12-2012, 11:42 AM   #44
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Maybe you could just put the jpgs on an SD card and put the card into one of those photo picture frames, that goes from one to the next. Then send them the picture frame + card. That way they wouldn't even have to turn on a computer in order to see them, even though they wouldn't see the annotations.
We tried that with FIL, 86. There was only one button to push ("on") but with all the other buttons on there he'd get confused, start messing around with it, get the settings all off and it would display only one photo.

He's just never going to get more technologically advanced than 1975.
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Old 10-12-2012, 12:57 PM   #45
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As a kid, I used to look at the family albums all the time. People do have attachment to images, though I don't even know where those family albums are any more.

I've shot thousands of travel photos over the years. I have them all on the computer but I don't always view them, though I've edited most of them, keyworded them and geotagged them. I haven't printed any either.

Ultimately, I plan to hook up my AppleTV and do some slide shows on the big screen. I'd done slide shows on the iPad. If there are videos among the stills, the slide show will cycle through the photos and when it gets to a video, play it back and then go back to stills. Really nicely done and you can play music along with it.

Remember teachers used to put on slide shows with projectors and then tape recorders, playing back "multimedia" slideshows. It wasn't a trivial undertaking back them. Now it's just a few clicks or taps.
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Old 10-12-2012, 05:51 PM   #46
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Let me put a question, what would be left of paper photos after a couple of generations of sorting as things are handed down? Once folks no longer know who the pictures are of then they might well be put in the trash.
Very true. When my parents decided to sell the house we kids grew up in, there were trunks from my grandparents houses that had never been opened since their houses had been cleaned out. There were hundreds and hundreds of photos (including tintypes and other 19th century photos) that we threw out because we had no indication who the people were. Very sad.
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Old 10-13-2012, 12:32 PM   #47
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This was really helpful to me. Until there is a metadata standard that will survive, I'm keeping two version, one I've edited to put captions in the photo itself...

http://gcoupe.wordpress.com/2011/12/...photo-gallery/
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Photo digitizing project
Old 08-22-2014, 02:56 PM   #48
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Photo digitizing project

Reviving an old topic:

I have a coupe of thousand photos I want to start scanning. I also have the negatives of many of the 35mm photos. Is it better to scan the photo or the negatives?

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Old 08-22-2014, 03:27 PM   #49
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You need a better scanner to scan 35mm negatives, and you would need to load the strips into a carrier. I did my slides a while back...slow and tedious:
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Old 08-22-2014, 03:29 PM   #50
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Reviving an old topic:

I have a coupe of thousand photos I want to start scanning. I also have the negatives of many of the 35mm photos. Is it better to scan the photo or the negatives?
Depends what you mean by better.

If you have a good dedicated film scanner and are comfortable correcting color casts, the negatives should yield better quality in terms of resolution as the print is a second generation copy.

But if you just have a flatbed scanner I would scan the print itself and not the negative. This will also be a *lot* faster (especially if your software lets you scan multiple images at once) as film scanning is incredibly slow.

Even If your flatbed scanner has a film attachment, I would still scan the photo print and not the negative/slide.

For out family photos, our strategy has been to scan the prints and throw away the negatives. I would only scan negatives/slides on a dedicated film scanner for the most important images.
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Old 08-22-2014, 03:30 PM   #51
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Reviving an old topic:

I have a coupe of thousand photos I want to start scanning. I also have the negatives of many of the 35mm photos. Is it better to scan the photo or the negatives?

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If you scan the negatives at 2400 dpi then you get about 3000 by 2000 resolution which would mean you could easily make a 8x10 print if needed. Note that however dust shows up worse on negatives than on prints, since the prints tend to be larger, so cleanup on negatives to print may be needed.. A 3x5 print at 300 dpi is about 1000x1500. Its not clear if prints justify going to 600 dpi however.
Note also that prints from the 1970s may show fading in color, while at least kodacolor and similar negatives from that time frame still seem to be ok on color. Scan a few older pictures both ways and see which makes the better image.
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Old 08-22-2014, 05:12 PM   #52
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Can you use these $100-200 MFC printers to scan old prints?
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Old 08-22-2014, 06:13 PM   #53
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Can you use these $100-200 MFC printers to scan old prints?
You can of course, but the results will be much better on a dedicated scanner for that purpose. The MF scanners that come on almost every printer now are not the best. They might be okay for your purposes, but that depends on how fussy you are about it.

I have a Canon Canoscan 9000F and have been very happy with it.
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Old 08-22-2014, 07:12 PM   #54
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I have done about 20k slides and negatives on epson photo scanners. Wore one out, tried to copy a book on one and broke it, now have a v.600 photo which seems to do a good job, does 4 slides, or 8 negatives with one scan. It is a flat bed scanner but with film attachments. Easily does 2400 dpi and will go higher but for slides 4800 which is the next setting is overkill as slide film does not have that kind of resolution.
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Old 08-22-2014, 07:37 PM   #55
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My 92 year old aunt passed away this year, but the year before she sent me my mother's photo collection. My mom was a camera fanatic, Kodak Brownie, and had always kept her own mom's pics, so there are literally many thousands of mostly family pictures, going back to the mid 1800's. The nice part, is that in those days, it was a habit to write dates, places and names on the back.

So last year I embarked on a project to at least begin to scan pictures, and over a few weeks managed to scan and catalog about 400 pictures... a good start...
until...
the hard drive on my computer went bad. Aargh.
So now the pictures lie, some tintype, many in frames, but most curled up and becoming brittle, in big boxes, on a shelf in the garage.

I no longer have a driving urge to work to preserve these pics for posterity. After all, how many people would be interested... and for how long.

So I wonder... would one of those feed scanners work well enough to just feed the picture into the rollers? Is it automatic to accept continuous feeds?
I just don't have the patience to use the flat bed scan.

My mom and Aunt... circa 1925:
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Old 08-22-2014, 08:01 PM   #56
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Has anyone here ever used a scanning service. I was looking into this a few months ago and found one that would scan negatives or slides for about $0.15 each in India, or about $0.20 to $0.30 each here in the USA. They claim to fix minor imperfections. I have a lot of 35mm negatives and slides I would like to scan.
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Old 08-22-2014, 08:16 PM   #57
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I've never used one since I didn't have that many we wanted to keep. I haven't heard any horror stories about lost photos but, really - India? I wouldn't send anything overseas that I wasn't willing to lose to save 5 or 10 cents per scan.
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Old 08-22-2014, 08:45 PM   #58
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I've never used one since I didn't have that many we wanted to keep. I haven't heard any horror stories about lost photos but, really - India? I wouldn't send anything overseas that I wasn't willing to lose to save 5 or 10 cents per scan.
I would be selective about what I sent to India vs what I did in the USA. But because they all (probably) travel by air, the likelihood of a total loss might not be very different.
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Old 08-22-2014, 09:06 PM   #59
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I question the wisdom of scanning thousands of photos. In the old film days we kept everything because we paid for each photo. Today we just delete the less interesting digital images. My approach is to do some serious editing and use today's standards. Would I really keep all of these images today? With the few that you do choose to keep take them to a place with a good high quality scanner and pay the money to preserve them had high resolution.

Recently I was clearing some space in the garage by getting rid of some photo albums. I choose to keep and scan about 50 of the photos out of about 500 photos.
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Old 08-22-2014, 09:26 PM   #60
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I question the wisdom of scanning thousands of photos. In the old film days we kept everything because we paid for each photo. Today we just delete the less interesting digital images. My approach is to do some serious editing and use today's standards. Would I really keep all of these images today? With the few that you do choose to keep take them to a place with a good high quality scanner and pay the money to preserve them had high resolution.

Recently I was clearing some space in the garage by getting rid of some photo albums. I choose to keep and scan about 50 of the photos out of about 500 photos.
Martyp I am hoping to do the same in getting rid of or at least not scanning the majority of the photos I have. I know there are probably 30% of the photos that I had printed in duplicate and I still have both copies. I was looking at photos of one of my daughters first birthday party and there were at least 10 photos of her sitting in her high chair eating cake. They all look more or less the same.

Walt34 I just bought the Canon 9000 Mark II from B&H Photovideo. Now I just to dedicate some time each week to work on this project.
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