Bulk Scanning Old Photos

[newideas]

Hi All,

My parents (like many other parents probably) have thousands of print photos from when we were kids. Now that my siblings and I are older and having kids we'd like to share and preserve these photos. The only option in my opinion is to digitize them and get them either onto DVD or the internet.

I was wondering what my options are for bulk scanning the photos. Is there software that will allow me to scan a bunch at a time and auto crop the images? I heard Photoshop does this but that may be to cost prohibitive. What have other people used?

Thanks!

 

[bratkinson]

At least now us "older folks" don't have to send out faded photos, have new shots taken of the photos and reprinted from there like in the "old" film days to get copies for our siblings, children, etc.

What I did for my siblings was to scan everything on my PC, then touch up/clean up/crop a bit each shot individually. Between "dust and scratches" and a tad of color correction and a bit more contrast on the B&W shots, the end result came out better than anyone had expected from 40-60 year old family photos. I then printed a set for each of us, and sent them each a CD with the pix and the printed pictures.

I did the same for an out-of-town friend that was cleaning up their childhood home on the passing of his father. He wondered if I could scan the family pictures he and his two sisters found and I, of course, agreed. I didn't expect the 150 or so shots they found in the old house. Some were as small as 1"x2"...and even some old photo-booth pictures from the 50's and 60's. I think I spent about 30 seconds swapping each picture into the scanner and scanning it, then another 15 seconds or so each doing my 'routine' Photoshop touchups, then saving them. In all, I spent about 3 hours getting them into the computer, and another hour or so printing them. Of course, the printer software cropped them a little oddly as I printed everything on 4"x6" photo paper I had. So 10% or so of the pictures had to be re-cropped in PS and then reprinted. I only printed one set of photos for my friend. He figured his sisters would print their own. Of course, CDs for all.

And if you have the ability to print on the CDs themselves, or have CD stickers and a stomper, I printed a nice 'family' picture of each family on the CDs and labeled them accordingly.

 

[MarkF48]

I recently bought a Plustek SmartPhoto P60 for scanning 4x6 photos for exactly the same reason you give. It's manual feed and it will scan a 4x6 in about 15 seconds at 600 dpi, which is adequate for viewing on a monitor, but likely wouldn't enlarge very well. Once the 4x6 feeds through it opens in the default viewer your PC has assigned to open JPG's. At that point you can delete the image if it's not quite right and do another scan. I've had a few that copied crooked or other minor issues that necessitated a rescan. I've done close to 300 photos in the course of a couple of days and am relatively happy with the results. Some reviews I saw on this scanner weren't too favorable and I wonder if it was a user problem rather than the scanner itself. I also have the negatives for the photos and having the digitized version will be a big help in locating a negative if I ever need to do so.
I do have a dedicated negative/slide scanner, but it would take much time to scan all that I have and be careful about dust as well.

When I purchased this it was $59.95. It currently isn't in stock, but possibly when restocked it may reflect the price I paid....
Plustek SmartPhoto P60 Photo Scanner 783064554268 B&H Photo