Danestress Posted January 5, 2011 Share Posted January 5, 2011 Can anyone who has made a project out of digitizing all their old slides and negatives from their "pre-digital camera" days talk to me about the experience? I have a ton of old slides of my great grand parents, grandparents, even a great-great grandmother. I have probably a hundred slides of my mother as a young child and her parents. And of course there are hundreds of slides and negatives of my own life. I don't want to pay someone to process them all. I will certainly pay to have the best possible digitization of the "best of the bunch." Say a couple hundred. But meanwhile, I am wanting to scan hundreds more of old photos, slides, and negatives. I want them to be "pretty good" quality scans. I've been looking at equipment to do this, but I think I need a real plan. Not just what equipment to buy, but maybe a book on how to organize, set up computer files, back up, etc. I'm so so so not an organizationally blessed person. Anyone? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perry Posted January 5, 2011 Share Posted January 5, 2011 I have hundreds of old slides and digitizing them was my New Years resolution last year. I got them all organized, which wasn't a problem, but once I started scanning them I realized it was going to take a ridiculously long time. We have an HP Scanjet 5500c, which can scan 3 slides at a time. But loading, scanning, editing, and saving those 3 slides took about an hour, and the quality just wasn't very good. So I gave up after a few hours and they're still sitting in a box. I'm just going to suck it up and have them done professionally. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dcjlkplus3 Posted January 5, 2011 Share Posted January 5, 2011 Have you looked at those negative scanners? I've seen them at Costco - they probably sell them online there as well. As far as organizing - I would go chronologically. If you have the actual pictures, I would make piles first by decade and then by year. You will probably end up with a very large pile of "no ideas" - try to go through these with any older relatives and get a photo safe pencil or pen and write whatever they say about them on the back. If you mostly have the negatives or slides, I would scan them all first and then do the same thing on my computer (I would NOT print them all out), with negatives, you may be able to go a little further than separating them by year, you may be able to do events within the year as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nestof3 Posted January 5, 2011 Share Posted January 5, 2011 Since we've taken far more photos than we will ever need, I decided to just scan my favorite photos and make digital photos that way. This would leave fewer negatives to digitize -- childhood ones, for example, when from an entire childhood, I only have one photo album. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asta Posted January 5, 2011 Share Posted January 5, 2011 Scanning seems like no big deal right up until you start to do it. And look at the results a home scanner actually gives you. Check out ScanCafe. It's worth the money. At some point, ya just got to realize that 500 hours of your time is 500 hours of your time. a Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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