Doing an audit on the remaining analog things in my life. Long story short, there is an active fire in our area (went from 0.5 acre to 22k) still not contained. Wind blew in the opposite direction so it’s not heading towards us anymore (as of now). At the time, as a safety check, I realized that I still had 4 boxes remaining of ‘analog stuff’ that weren’t digitized yet (Every few months I tackle a portion of the box).
3 boxes of paper and 1 box containing photo albums. These analog dedicated boxes are within reach for me to grab in case we have to ever evacuate. I believe everything else in the house can be fixed later with a purchase or a restore from an offsite backup. I would probably just also grab the Mac Mini, or Passport attached and maybe the NAS if time allows.
Anyhow, I digress. When it comes to paper…that’s easy I just use Scanner Pro.
When it comes to old family photos…I haven’t digitized those in a long time. I can’t remember what my workflow was back then. But for today, 2024. these photos are already printed and in photo albums.
Which is most ideal? I think it’s maybe 2-3 Large Photo Albums, probably less than 500 photos.
Are all apps the same when doing this project?
Open up iOS Camera App and snap away?
Scanner Pro and snap away?
Purchase a flatbed scanner?
I do not have any of the 35mm negative film itself.
Any 4800dpi Canon or Epson that is clean should work. We’ve always just borrowed someone’s. 500 photos should be doable in one movie night with one person sorting and labeling, and one person scanning.
Years (5 +?) ago, I used a Google iPhone app that prompted you to take overlapping photographs of existing photo.
The app would stitch together the images into one photo.
The benefit of this was that it would eliminate the shadow of holding your iphone over an album or physical photo, and it used Google computational algorithms (cloud based?) to remove glare and other artifacts.
this made the results much better than simply an iPhone scanning app or photo app pressed into digitizing service and especially useful when multiple photos are on an album page and you didn’t want to physically remove them to place into a proper flatbed scanner (plus the added time involved).
I had a bunch of snapshot type pictures I wanted to digitize. Ran them through my ScanSnap S1500 in photo mode. Printed on of the images and compared it to the original. Slight difference but quite acceptable.
If you need better quality you can always use one of the scanning services.
When archiving photos you want to aim for greater precision than the originals, not the same. That way a) you have margin if you misjudge whether your scans were good enough, b) you’re protected against quality loss that may creep in from resaves and edits and changing hands.
Rather than buying a flatbed, could you just use a service to digitize? I’m thinking you’d probably be money and time ahead. Many cities have local places with good scanners that can do all your photos for a comparatively reasonable fee.
I remember scanning old photos with Google’s PhotoScan app. It allows you to take several pics of the analog photo and then stitches then together into a better image. It does not only correct the usual perspective issues but I think it peforms some image processing.
Development is not very active, but the app was updated last year so it’s still alive and kicking (for a Google product, that is)
