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photo scanning/archiving project
Ana Ng
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I was hoping I could get some ideas or advice for this particular venture...
A year or so ago, my husbands maternal grandmother passed away. During that time I became aware of a collection of hundreds family photos spanning a few generations, that were taken from her house.
I discussed with the rest of the family how nice it would be to go through them, try to identify the dates and the people in the photos, and then scan them all so that we have a digital archive.
I know the most efficient way would probably be to find someone I can hire to do this task, but knowing my finances I don't think that's realistic, at least not in the time frame I'd like to get this started.
Has anyone undertaken a big project like this? I'd love suggestions on how to get the photos organized, and how to keep the digital copies organized. If there is some sort of specific program that will make it easy to associate a date+names with each file.
A year or so ago, my husbands maternal grandmother passed away. During that time I became aware of a collection of hundreds family photos spanning a few generations, that were taken from her house.
I discussed with the rest of the family how nice it would be to go through them, try to identify the dates and the people in the photos, and then scan them all so that we have a digital archive.
I know the most efficient way would probably be to find someone I can hire to do this task, but knowing my finances I don't think that's realistic, at least not in the time frame I'd like to get this started.
Has anyone undertaken a big project like this? I'd love suggestions on how to get the photos organized, and how to keep the digital copies organized. If there is some sort of specific program that will make it easy to associate a date+names with each file.
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I STRONGLY recommend you scan individual album pages (removed from any plastic protective covering) instead of taking the photos out and scanning them individually. Then either use a scanner which has an option to separate photos into different files, or manually separate them yourself using an image editing software.
Clean the glass after every single scan. It takes longer, but you'll get a lot of dust & paper residue on the screen if you don't.
Save the files as .PNG documents, not JPEGs, to maintain image quality.
Separate the saved images into separate folders, with each folder being designated for a specific album.
If you're using a PC, when you single-click on an image file, a little menu thing at the bottom of the window should allow you to add tags (good for labeling who's in which photo, and dating,) and to title the picture.
Don't do the date/person id stuff until you've got everything scanned. It's WAY faster to enter the stuff in digitally. Otherwise you'll be entering in that information twice.
I made CDs with the albums on them to give to various relatives who kept insisting they were missing copies of stuff. (They weren't, but my relatives are crazy.) Today, I'd suggest buying some flash-drives that can hold the entire photo archive and then backing everything up to Google Drive.
Thank you! I'll have to take a closer look to see how many are actually in albums and how many are just floating around by themselves. I think the majority are just random floaters which will make it take longer, although there's no reason I can't just scan multiple photos at a time and then separate digitally. Definitely a good suggestion on that. Also thank you for the note on about saving as .PNG!