Ask HN: How to scan and archive slides and photos? I have a few thousand slides and photos that I would like to scan and archive myself. Currently I'm considering a scanner in the Epson Perfection V550 Photo range and writing a small program to store and tag the image blobs. I wonder what others use and what works well, both for hardware and software? Any recommendations, dos and don'ts, etc. that you can share? Thanks :) |
2) pick out a handful of different "exemplar" slides from your collection (a portrait, a group shot, a landscape, ...), and for each, try out the built-in auto exposure, auto image quality enhancers, and auto dust removal features. Some work great, some turn your scan into a posterized mess, and some will only work well for certain shots.
3) put your slides into yyyy-mm-dd directories, or name the image something like `yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss.jpg`. Some software (like PhotoStructure) will infer the captured-at time based on the date encoded in the file name or parent directory of it's missing from the exif metadata. You may want to pre-sort the slides by date to make this easier.
4) if you're going to edit all of them after scanning, use TIFF. If you aren't, use JPEG at a high quality setting (like 95%).
5) clean the slides beforehand if you can (research how to do this safely). It's a lot easier to make a nice scan if the source was cleaner to begin with.
6) see if you're scanner supports batch or gang scans. If you've got 3200 slides and you can do them in batches of 8 or 16, that's a lot less fiddling than doing every one, one after another.
7) take your time. You'll burn out of you do too many in one sitting, and not finish.