Tools, methods, and approaches to archiving memories (photos, videos, etc.)

[aja8888]

It does this with the SW that came with it.
It is a Canoscan 9000F Mark II.

It also does four 35mm slides at a time.

I usually do 600dpi JPEG files. I am not looking for ultimate image quality but, "snapshot" quality files.

I have the same scanner and have done many slides to jpeg's. It's a great tool.

 

[RobertTN]

Hi all.

My mother passed away in 2016 and my father is 87 with mid-stage dementia.

As a result of my father's dementia, we are moving him into assisted living. As a result of that move, one of my sisters and I went through all his belongings to decide what to move to his new assisted living apartment, what to give away, etc.

I now have in my home perhaps four or five bankers' boxes full of photographs, videos, etc. Probably 90% of the memories are regular 4x6 or 3x5 Kodak style prints. Approximately half are in the old photo albums with the sticky cellophane pages. The remaining small portion are things like digital camera cards, Hi-8 video cartridges, and even a super 8 reel. Many of these evoke great memories.

I would like to digitize most or all of them and distribute the digital content to family members.

There are two possibilities I know of to do this:

1. Legacy box. I think there is a company that we can mail everything to, and they'll do all the work. I have two concerns with this approach: with the volume of stuff we have it could be expensive, and I'm fearful of mailing that much stuff to them in case something happens.

2. Buy some sort of device from Best Buy that can scan and upload pictures. I'm willing to do this work if the scanner has something like a document feeder, and software that makes it work better than simply using a Windows scan driver.

Questions:

1. What other options are there that people might recommend?

2. Any comments or experiences with doing anything like this?

Thanks!

We have used this service and were extremely happy. They were able to convert old photos, slides, tapes, etc. into electronic formats that now sit in our dropbox.com account.

 

[dadu007]

I recommend ScanCafe. Wait for their 40% off coupons around every holiday (not just the Christmas holiday). Easy peasy. Save your labor.

 

[samcat]

We've also used ScanCafe and they did a fine job. We're in California and have used Photos Movies and More, too. We had a representative come to our house and help us figure out packing, best way to do things, etc. Really happy with them, too.

 

[thisisme543]

Try Office Lens

There's a phone app called Office Lens by Microsoft that has a document scanning mode. One click to take the picture, then it will automatically crop to the edges of the document, and one more click to save the photo either locally on your phone or to Microsoft Onedrive. Highly recommended both for photos as well as any other documents you need to scan. You will want good lighting setup to avoid shadows.

For some reason the "photo" option doesn't seem to crop automatically, only the document option does.

 

[albireo13]

I've looked into ScanCafe. Most of the work, for me, is in going through the photos and slides and deciding what to scan and thinning the herd. I'd have to be ruthless in doing this with ScanCafe or I'd go broke!

If you send in a box of slides or prints to ScanCafe, how do they organize the scanned files that you get back?
That is also a big part of the job.