I want to scan some very old family scrapbooks. I found one on amazon Plustek A3. It does have same scanning engine as Snapscan. Any ideas?
I have not researched scanners in a while; my Epson all-in-one and Nikon 35mm film scanner are still covering my occasional needs that can’t be handled by the ScanSnap.
I scanning software, I recommended VueScan. It has a fairly extensive list of supported scanners as well as a good feature set.
I’ve found it easier to photograph scrapbooks rather than scan them on a flatbed, especially if they’re quite bumpy and full of ephemera. Using the scanner seems to create some odd shadowing.
I agree with Meredith, scrapbooks with lots of embellishments do not scan at all well. I did some test scanning of old scrapbooks for the historical society and it did not work well.
Peter Krogh has the best book on how to set up a good copystand. He talks about scanning prints, negatives, slides and other items. Link here
Needs a high resolution digital camera, good lights, and a good sturdy camera mounting point. The one that is on my wishlist is this one Copy stand
Of course I have to add a really good digital camera. Probably something with a Nikon adapter as I have a good microNikkor lens that is ideal for the task.
I put my huge scrapbook scanning project on hold for a while until I finish my other scanning project that I have all the tools for. I’m using VueScan (fiddly and PITA to get set up but does work well once you understand its quirks) and an older Epson 4780 photo scanner to digitize some 18K negatives and slides. Then I have about another 1000 prints to scan and I need to finish the 1500 glass plate negatives for the Historical society. Once those are done that’s when I’ll get the good copy stand set-up. My plan is to test on my stuff and then tackle the roughly 100 scrapbooks in our Historical society archives.
I’m going to put a plug in for cataloging as well. Especially the more historical the items are the more important it is to catalog them so they can be useful for the next generation. For the historical society collections I’m using metadata capture using Western States Dublin Core Best Practices Version 2.0, Library of Congress Subject Header thesaurus [LCSH] and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names for location references.
For my personal stuff I have a defined vocabulary of hierarchical keywords in LightRoom and also adding as much of the rest of the EXIF data as I know into the files.