Community Newsletter: Q&A forum: What is the fastest and best method to scan photos into a computer?

I have used this service and was very, very satisfied. One option is that they will send you a prepaid box that you can fill with as many photos as it will hold (in our case 2100, with careful stacking)for a very reasonable price. I shopped for local options first and nobody came even close to this price--it was double, triple or more locally. The end result was remarkably good, as well as surprisingly fast. I opted not to pay them to turn them all the same way on the photo disk and to allow them to scan in random order; for my purposes this was fine. The only bad part is shipping off precious photos and worrying that something will happen to them en route.There is some risk there.

It sounds, however, like the questioner is thinking of starting a business that involves photo scanning. If that is the case, Scan My Photos might still be an option to consider--pay them to do the work.

Hi,

Not to intrude but to tell you that our company does specialize in what you are talking about...
If you wish you can have a look at our website or call us and we will be glad to answer all your questions

Thanks

www.saveyouraudiovideo.com

Thank you for this great article about the company doing this tedious task.

I am one of these people who would like to know if there was a faster way to scan photographs into a pc. The only software I want is one that can tell the difference between landscape and a portray picture. I would prefer to load the picture as they are, because in time software is getting better at repairing old pictures and when I need a hard copy I then can go to work on repairing it as I think it should be. Having the original on file is always the best practices. A lot of editing can be done before the scanning is started. Such as, family, work and business shots all lined up separable. Moreover, on each of them you can use there dates as an index. All that is needed now is a magazine holder for each type of picture size and some type of auto feeder. I was thinking of a small feeder as they use for scanning your lodgement document into the bank, but adapted for cards. If this was designed to be linked to a digital cameras instead of a scanner it would speed up the process and allow any size picture and negative to pass thought. Lighting and auto sizing and position of shots is all that is needed. As I said early on, the rest can be done when needed. The most important thing is getting it into the digital form into your pc.
Digital pictures are made up of pixels that have a number attached to each one, that never changes. Each colour and shade has a number also. Unlike emulsion pictures stored over a long time, they do not fade. The colour and shade is as true as the first day it was taken. Each picture is as true as the printer and paper is capable of producing it. The digital negative if you can use an old meaning does not change in time as does emulsion. Emulsion is a chemical reaction that is still going on and that why it is not suitable for very long storage of pictures. It becomes a guessing game when trying to work out the true colour and shade of an old shot. This is not the case with digital as each colour and shade is recorded and number when first taken. Finding a secure way to store numbers, which is what a digital picture is in the end, is all that is needed. There are many ways to do this now. As to know which is going to last over time, it is clear that a hard copy cannot compete in any way.

In response to the message about having 70 year old pictures and preferring them. That is fine but since my parents had a house fire right after I moved out many years ago, I would always suggest that people scan those old photos and have an online backup site or have copies of the cd's at your parents or child's home.

My parents lost many of their photos of our childhood vacations, some were salvaged but many lost. Everyone thinks it would never happen to them but seeing pictures of peoples homes after a hurricans, tornado or fire is enough to remind me to backup even my digital photos.

Sue

Regarding foxwood farm's comments on the shelf life of digital media and whatnot, I have to say that the logic doesn't quite pan out. No matter what you do, your paper photos, as well as the negatives from which they were printed, will deteriorate with time to the point at which they are essentially gone. Furthermore, as someone else pointed out, their quality will slowly deteriorate even before they become junk. Your 50 year old photos may be in excellent shape, but they are not as good as the day they were printed. In ten more years, they will be slightly less good.

On the other hand, digital media, no matter how poor the shelf life of CD's, DVD's, or magnetic media may turn out to be, can be backed up indefinitely at very little cost, and because the media is digital, the backup copy is exactly as good as the original, and always will be. If you have a way to back up your hard disk already, as many of us do, all you have to do is keep your photos on your hard disk. If you back it up regularly, you will always have an extra copy. If you are worried about the chance of losing both your primary and backup disks, in a fire say, then you can keep as many CD backups as you want, wherever you want. Again, each backed up copy will be exactly as good as the original copy.

Just a thought.

I have an Epson Perection 4490 PHOTO. It comes with a plastic frame designed to hold various sized negatives. The frame I use holds frames of six 35mm negatives. It scans the negatives into twelve color photos. I have digitized thousands of my 35mm negatives without trouble or faults. All came out in Jpeg format and there has been no problem modifying or printing any of these pictues.

You post of an inexpensive method of scanning and the cost of same but I can find no mention of how to purchase? I'm in Canada and have thousands of old pictures. How do I get this unit.
Regards, Chuck G.

I recently used www.scantodigital.com

They scanned about 500 of my photos for around $60 plus shipping. Good job. Best of all I didn't have to scan them myself. I tried scanning myself and it drove me crazy. They had them scanned within 4 days.

Dave

That is certainly one way to 'reproduce' a print but I don't recommend it even though I've been forced on more than a few occasions to do it exactly that way. Without a well planned work area the results are most often disappointing. Reflections from the print surface alone will soon drive a person nuts if they are trying to light the prints with a direct source such as the sun. Even indirect lighting will have some degree of reflections. And glass to make the prints stay flat? Again maddening reflections. Using a polarizer when doing this technique can help but isn't always a sure thing.

Another thing that has to be done almost perfectly is to get the print perfectly even within the frame but it doesn't stop there. The plane of the print and plane of the film or digital sensor also need to be in near perfect in parallel alignment. Distortion is almost guaranteed no matter how careful you are. There are photo copy stands made for this very purpose but a good one would probably cost more than a scanner and the time involved using a copy stand would be more.

But as a last resort this technique (taking a photo of a photo) used on a limited basis can get you some usable results when nothing better is available. I would not recommend using this technique if 1)you are wanting better than average reproduction and 2)you don't have six months of free time.

Oh, one more thing....don't even think about doing this technique without using a tripod.

I have done the very same thing with my mobile phone camera. USB'd them onto my HD and got a "surprisingly high quality" image. I have a question of my own. Don't know if this is how I go about it.....but could you or anyone, for that matter, please tell me how to convert a scanned photo negative, into a photo please? I have an HP Photosmart C6280 All-in-One scanner/printer, which can do really "high" res scans. I can not see though, any menu for this conversion. Nor can I find it in photoshop 7. I have Windows XP Pro as an OS. Any ideas? Thanks.

Re: "What is the best way to scan photos at home if I have hundreds and don't want to stand over a flatbed scanner all day long?"

The honest truth is .... there is no easy way to do this, or at least to do it well.

I have a small business buying, servicing and reselling used Nikon film scanners. These scan negatives and slides, not prints, but I get the same question all the time, and it goes something like this: "I have {hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands} of {slides, negatives or prints} taken over a period of {quantity} decades by my family and it's earlier generations. How can I scan these quickly and inexpensively.

And the answer is, unfortunately, you can't.

QUALITY scanning of photographs (or anything, for that matter) is not just a matter of slapping the media on the scanner glass and pressing a "scan" button and POOF! you are done. Yes, you can do that, but you won't get quality. Scanning is a complex task and the learning curve for GOOD scanning software is steep and requires some understanding of the physics of light, printing, photography and video displays. If the image quality is important, you will want to set the resolution, do a preview scan, manually crop, manually adjust the exposure parameters (typically brightness, contrast and "gamma" (all of which sometimes go by other names)), then do a final scan. You may want to correct color, which is much more involved, and you may want to do post-scan processing with photoshop or another photo editing program to fix any number of different types of defects. You will be very lucky, no matter whether it is film or prints, to average much better than 4 to 6 minutes per image. And if you are talking about thousands of images (and I'd say that most families have that many, oftne going back generations to pre- World War II) .... well, you are talking about hundreds of hours.

There are services that do scanning of film and prints (by the way, if you have the film (e.g. negatives or slides), SCAN THOSE NOT PRINTS ... the quality is MUCH higher, but you need a good film scanner). However, there are two problems with services: The first is cost, if they charge 79 cents per image, which sounds reasonable enough, but you have 2,000 images, suddently you are looking at almost $2,000 (there are "extra" costs that add up) ....... And then there is the other problem, precisely because this is a labor intensive task, most of these services send the originals to 3rd world countries where the labor is cheap, so you photos or film gets a round trip to Haiti or Bangladesh or India or Pakistan .... and sometimes, not often, but sometimes it just disappears.

To be sure, some equipment is better and/or faster than others, but the actual scan time is often only about 20% to 50% of the total image processing time. But don't fall into the trap of buying equipment that either can't do a good job or won't because it needs serviced. I also service Nikon film scanners, and one of the things that I hear often is a half-joking (but half-serious) E-Mail after I return a freshly serviced film scanner that goes something like this: "Damn you, I just got may scanner back, and the images are so much better than what I had been getting that I am now faced with an demanding compulsion to rescan my entire collection. Your "repair" is going to cause me to have to put in hundreds of hours of additional work !!"

As to the equipment: One strategy that works well is to buy a good used scanner, use it and resell it. Although the scanner may cost hundreds to perhaps even $1,500, depending on what you get, this stuff holds it's value well and if you bought it used, you may well recover all or substantially all of your purchase price when you resell it. This is more of an issue with film, however, because prints can usually be scanned well with any really good quality flatbed scanner. As to brands, for prints, I'm partial to Epson and SOME (but not all) HP scanners [avoid any scanner with a "CIS" imaging system]. For film (either slides or negatives), I really think that there are 3 good choices, they are Nikon, Nikon and Nikon, but I am biased and some of the Epson flatbed scanners really can do an excellent job with film (and they may be the only choice if you need to scan film images larger than 35mm). When buying a scanner to scan film, don't even consider a unit that does not have a feature known as "digital ICE". This technology (which uses an infra-red scan in addition to visible light scans) is pure magic producing georgous, defect free scans of even very badly scratched and damaged film. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with prints, black and white film or SOME slide films, but it is just magic with most negative films and most but not all slide films. Digital ICE was a patented technology developed by an independent firm and licensed to many scanner makers, but only some brands (including both Nikon and Epson) offer it, and even then not necessarily on all models of their products.

I hope this helps, but I understand that wasn't the answer that you probably wanted to hear.

Please send your contact information.
I too, am interested in a used film scanner.
Thanks

I would be interested in a used Nikon film scanner from Watzman; if you could give him my email address so he could contact me.