I used a scanner with a document feeder for same-size photos. It wasn't the greatest quality, but sufficient for our needs.

It would have been way too much to use a flatbed scanner.

I have some more to do now, but stuffed if I can find the scanner in our messy garage!

La Penguina used https://photomyne.com/

She photographed all photos with her phone and then downloaded them from their web site . The app does keystone correction etc.

Quality looked about the same as using our Brother scanner.

Flicking through many before turfing the originals, it really struck me how many of us are poor photographers. Nice photo of some people on the beach but why go back 50 feet to take it? You can barely make out the faces of the subjects.

if your collection is like what i have, one of the earlier things to deal with is sorting them somehow. mine is mostly a jumbled mess where even film strips (cut in 4 or 6 frames) are not always grouped with the same roll of film that they came from. i guess some of them got reprinted/enlarged and didn't find their way back into the same sleeve.

on the process, i have found that there are at least two ways to go about this:

• digitise quickly and share
• get the best (archival) quality to preserve them for future generations

i took the second approach, and have been chipping away at it for a few years now, as time permits. they're all in my lightroom catalog, currently saying there are >2400 of them. where i have film (negatives / positive slides) i scan those with a nikon coolscan v (110/135), or epson 4180 for the odd MF/LF film. most of the prints were scanned with the epson 4180, but i have a few done recently with the scanner of an epson ET-8550. still considering an epson ff-680w for the more generic (a bit less than the special ones) prints to scan.

time consumed depends a lot on the source material and, unfortunately for me, a lot of my source were not looked after. for film in good shape, it takes me about 15 minutes per frame (positive or negative), the damaged ones take several orders of magnitude longer. off the top of my head, one of the oldest i've done is that of my grandfather from 1942 - best guess really, as his generation and the one after that have all moved on from this world.

elpenguino's comment is also 100% correct. you soon realise that most of the stuff you're working on are snapshots rather than photographs. however, they still retain sentimental value - family you'll never get to see, or talk to, again.

I did ours using Google PhotoScan app of the actual photo (not the negative).

I did this during Covid lockdowns  and set myself a target of about 30 per day (it is a really boring task).

I have a few more to do now that I came across some more in Mum & Dad's albums when they passed away in the last 2 years.

I did about 2000 photos on a flat-bed scanner about ten years ago. It was a labour of love but we are still rapt with the results. 

Our scanner was very basic - HP Envy 4500 which cost $45 at the time - but the results were excellent IMO. It had a feature - called ‘edge detection’ IIRC - which meant you could load three or four photos for each scan pass and it would make them all separate scans/files. I didn’t have to worry about orientation because if some of them were wrong, it was easy to rotate them later.

Certainly agree it’s the sorting prior to scanning that is equally a PITA when doing this. You can sort the order of the photos after scanning but that’s as much of a PITA as doing it prior.

What we found is with an MFP, scanning directly to a usb drive or memory card is way faster than to a computer.

Jon

I had to do 30 years of my dad's slides, fast, as my sister (in Canada) wanted to go through them with her teens.
She was on borrowed time...

I set up a tripod and my best digital camera - then projected them onto a slide screen.
Everybody was happy with the result - some of the slides were 50 years old and had fungus or fade.
It didn't really matter - it's the content, not the absolute-best quality that's important.

I'd take much the same approach with printed photos - scanners are just too slow.
Even a good phone will give you a good many-megapixel image.
And you should be able to bang through a dozen a minute ;-)
Just work a bit on the lighting and reduce glare.

Since your results will be digital and around for a while - probably the most important thing is to name them with your best indication of who, what, when & where.
If you can't fit enough into the filename - then create a log file of some sort.
Somebody down the line will thank you for it.
I have old prints from my parents (during WW2) that I wish I had more info on.

eracode:

 

I did about 2000 photos on a flat-bed scanner about ten years ago. It was a labour of love but we are still rapt with the results. 

Our scanner was very basic - HP Envy 4500 which cost $45 at the time - but the results were excellent IMO. It had a feature - called ‘edge detection’ IIRC - which meant you could load three or four photos for each scan pass and it would make them all separate scans/files. I didn’t have to worry about orientation because if some of them were wrong, it was easy to rotate them later.

 

This is the way to to prints, better if you can procute / borrow a larger scanner of A3 size. Fit as many prints as you can and do them all on one pass, let the software seperate them out into individual files. I used 3rd party software "Scanspeeder" or one like that, paid for it but that one appears to have a free version now. 

I did slides & negatives from a couple of hundred dollar scanning box from Harvey Norman, did an excellent job for the price. 

Would have been a 500+ slides, few hundred negatives and a few thousand photos. Slides and negatives were the worst because of having to load them into a caddy (did not like the results from a flatbed) then manually pass them through one at a time. Photos were not so bad using the multi scan method. Doing it for a few hours at a time whilst listening to something / helped but it's something you only have to do once. Still took a week or two. 

Anyone got a method for 16mm film? 

I did similar to eracode, the ability to scan several at once and automatically crop is a big plus

for older photos, I used Picasa’s “I’m feeling lucky” tool to fix brightness, contrast and colour balance. This gave surprisingly good results - I’m sure nowhere as good as photoshop etc but a huge improvement over the print

From an email back in 2020....For those people with a bit of spare time now , and a scanner at home and a windows PC.

I’ve bought software called AUTOSPLITTER. US$19 – I used Paypal to protect my credit card details.

It lets you place  multiple photos on the scanner in any orientation, then scan, then it extracts the photos . You then rotate them if required, and can add a ‘date’ or ‘comment’ on all the photos or individually..... it wasn't too painful 

Wellingtondave:

 

eracode:

 

Our scanner was very basic - HP Envy 4500 which cost $45 at the time - but the results were excellent IMO. It had a feature - called ‘edge detection’ IIRC - which meant you could load three or four photos for each scan pass and it would make them all separate scans/files. I didn’t have to worry about orientation because if some of them were wrong, it was easy to rotate them later.

 

 

This is the way to to prints, better if you can procute / borrow a larger scanner of A3 size. Fit as many prints as you can and do them all on one pass, let the software seperate them out into individual files. I used 3rd party software "Scanspeeder" or one like that, paid for it but that one appears to have a free version now. 

 

I did slides & negatives from a couple of hundred dollar scanning box from Harvey Norman, did an excellent job for the price. 

 

Would have been a 500+ slides, few hundred negatives and a few thousand photos. Slides and negatives were the worst because of having to load them into a caddy (did not like the results from a flatbed) then manually pass them through one at a time. Photos were not so bad using the multi scan method. Doing it for a few hours at a time whilst listening to something / helped but it's something you only have to do once. Still took a week or two. 

 

Anyone got a method for 16mm film? 

 

thankfully, the ability to scan multiple prints on flatbed scanners appear to be becoming more common now. i used to use the software Vuescan to let me do this, but i see it on epson's newer software now.

by 16mm film, you mean from the old 110 film cartridges, i use a 3D-printed adaptor for the coolscan v, but some film capable flatbed scanners have a frame adaptor to support those.

nitro:

 

Wellingtondave:

 

eracode:

 

Our scanner was very basic - HP Envy 4500 which cost $45 at the time - but the results were excellent IMO. It had a feature - called ‘edge detection’ IIRC - which meant you could load three or four photos for each scan pass and it would make them all separate scans/files. I didn’t have to worry about orientation because if some of them were wrong, it was easy to rotate them later.

 

 

This is the way to to prints, better if you can procute / borrow a larger scanner of A3 size. Fit as many prints as you can and do them all on one pass, let the software seperate them out into individual files. I used 3rd party software "Scanspeeder" or one like that, paid for it but that one appears to have a free version now. 

 

I did slides & negatives from a couple of hundred dollar scanning box from Harvey Norman, did an excellent job for the price. 

 

Would have been a 500+ slides, few hundred negatives and a few thousand photos. Slides and negatives were the worst because of having to load them into a caddy (did not like the results from a flatbed) then manually pass them through one at a time. Photos were not so bad using the multi scan method. Doing it for a few hours at a time whilst listening to something / helped but it's something you only have to do once. Still took a week or two. 

 

Anyone got a method for 16mm film? 

 

 

thankfully, the ability to scan multiple prints on flatbed scanners appear to be becoming more common now. i used to use the software Vuescan to let me do this, but i see it on epson's newer software now.

 

by 16mm film, you mean from the old 110 film cartridges, i use a 3D-printed adaptor for the coolscan v, but some film capable flatbed scanners have a frame adaptor to support those.

 

 

 

Yes ViewScan is great as it has all the drivers for older model scanners. I have used it with an old HP scanner that had the attachment and light source in the lid to do slides and negatives. I have done several slide collections- very slowly, as I can only do 3 at once and 2400dpi takes a while.

I might see how it goes on the flatbed for another photo collection I have- I can't find my document feeder scanner, so I'll see how ViewScan automatically crops multiple prints at once like it did with the slides.