Best way to bulk scan old photos

MarcLister

MarcLister

MarcLister

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A colleague of mine is quite into his photography and has a dSLR. He's probably leaving/retiring at the end of the year and he's a true gent so I always like to help him out where I can. He's got loads, and I mean boxes, of old photo from the days of film cameras! He wants to sort through them and scan them in so he can save space on the photos. I did try to help him find a scanner with a film scanning accessory but we didn't succeed there.

So apart from spending, hours, weeks, months scanning 2-3 photos at a time on a flatbed scanner, what would be the best (quickest) way of scanning many, many photographs? I'd like to find the quickest and easiest way of bulk scanning all the photos he's got.

I did suggest a document scanner but he'd have to prepare so many sheets of A4 paper and stick 2-3 photos per sheet on with the risk that the document scanner might not like having paper + photo being sent through its mechanism.

I don't think there's much point in suggesting a budget to adhere to until I get some ideas of the possible solutions and how much my colleague is willing to pay himself.

Cheers in advance. :)
 
if there mostly 6x4`s
you could use a toshiba journe scanner, google it
they scan to SDcard so you can just sit there with the box of pictures, no need for a PC
till you want to look at the pic`s
71T4uJw5bYL__AA1500_.jpg
 
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I used a cheap canon document scanner that was fine taking odd shapes and cropped/rotated/straightened pretty much anything I threw at it. Unfortunately it died after 1000 pages and never got to test it on photos properly.
 
I'm currently using a Pandigital SCN02. It is completely no-frills scanner, just feed the photo in and move on to the next. No software for image enhancements or organization or anything fun at all. As said above, it uses an SD card so no need for a PC, so you can just scan away while watching the tube or something.

It does the job as well as you'd expect from any scanned photo. If it is really something you'd want to enhance or print larger it will require some post-processing. Contrast and colour seem to be just fine, and it was certainly a fair price.

I have put about 750 photos through it so far, and a couple dozen negative strips. Seems to be completely adequate for my needs.

It defaults to 300dpi for photos, and 1200dpi for negatives, but can be changed to 600dpi for photos if you'd like. And of course it will only do 4"x6" or smaller photos.
 
It may or may not help but if you're dealing with more than 100 photos then the answer is the best way is to pay somebody else to do it. Best hardware and software going and it'll still be exceptionally tedious. And when you're looking at throwing probably a couple of hundred quid at a scanner if you want really decent results (and if you're bothering at all, you really should) then it's not as expensive as you'd initially think.
 
I agree with bigredshark, best to pay a professional that has high end equipment and expertise, unless you have lots of time and not so much money and are not worried about quality.

Best to find the negatives as well.
 
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Thanks for all the replies. I'll have a chat with my colleague and see what he likes the sound of. He's quite capable with computers so I'm sure he'll be happy scanning stuff in himself but the cost of the equipment might put him off that.
 
if you can get the negatives (aldi) has a cheap 5mp scanner this week that looks ok. I dont have one though so cant give advise on how good it is.
 
marcus123 said:
Hello!

I want to know which scanner is used to scan photographs. Actually, I want to buy it, so please suggest me it at an affordable price.
Click to expand...

Great thread revival for a first post it's only been 5 years since this thread was current!

How many pictures do you have to scan? how much money do you have and what level of quality do you want?
 
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