Photo digitizing project

[meierlde]

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?

Thanks


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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.

 

[explanade]

Can you use these $100-200 MFC printers to scan old prints?

 

[Walt34]

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.

 

[meierlde]

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.

 

[imoldernu]

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:

 

[Rustward]

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.

 

[Walt34]

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.

 

[Rustward]

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.

 

[martyp]

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.

 

[fidler4]

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.

 

[explanade]

As kids, my sisters and I used to look at the family photo album over and over again.

Don't even know where it is now.

If you scan and tag them, so easy to search and find them again, instead of going through old boxes or who knows what.

 

[photoguy]

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.

I think what you are seeing is a limitation of flatbed scanners which have a true optical resolution of around 2000 dpi regardless of their outrageously inflated technical specs. I think my canoscan 9000 claims 9600 dpi yet struggles to achieve 2k real on a resolution target.

Slide film can definitely benefit from 4000+ dpi scans if the film is a sharp capture.

However scanning at high dpi is an incredible chore -- it takes a really long time and you are left with humongous files. My strategy has been to use 8bit 2700 dpi scans for the majority of personal slides and only go to 5400 for select images. This is on a dedicated Minolta film scanner (which to my surprise actually achieved it stated resolution of ~5400 dpi)




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[walkinwood]

You need to be sure what you want to do with the end result. Is it to print or to view on your computer screen.

It is very hard to determine the image in a color negative, so there's a lot of wasted time previewing negatives that you decide you don't want. You will not have this issue with scanning prints.

I just finished a scanning project with a few hundred negatives using an Epson Perfection V500 Photo. There were 120 and 35mm negatives & some slides.

The scanned negatives look better than scanned prints as long as you brush/blow them clean. My scanner has technology called ICE (google it) which "removes" dust, but I didn't like the end result most of the times. It does not work well on some B&W negatives that I have and also has some artifacts on Kodachrome slides. It also doubles the scanning time. There is a software "dust removal" that works well if the negative starts out relatively clean.

The scanner color corrects quite well with color negatives, but had a hard time with old slides. I scanned at 1200 dpi right into jpeg which made it faster. The ones that I want to print, I re-scanned at a higher dpi into a tiff file. If you take the trouble of scanning negatives & plan to keep the latter, work out a filing/naming system so you can go identify the negative by looking at the image file name.

But like others have mentioned, scanning slides is slow and tedious. I got into a rhythm where I worked on something else at the computer while the negatives were being scanned. I have a big monitor, so could leave a space to see the progress. I worked at it for an hour at a time and that worked for me. I will print only a handful of them, but I liked the better quality.