Most of my stuff is not RAW format so no sidecar xmps are made.
My archival scans are TIFFs most more recent digital photography is JPEG
Yep, those posts are some of the info I used to develop my own slightly modified version of naming. Works great once you decide and implement it.
I have toyed with the idea of digitalizing our photo albums as well and really like the idea of your system. Do you feel like the image quality you got out of the scanner was durable (i.e. did the resolution hold up)? This is my biggest concern.
Long term archival quality scans is a huge issue for me becaue Iām working to scan a lot of stuff for the historical society as well. For a really good book on how to determine what resolution to scan at get the book
āDigital Imaging A Practical Approachā by Jill Koelling
It goes into detail about how to determine what is suitable.
This resource has a lot of good info too https://dpbestflow.org/node/633
And of course the venerable DAM book by Krogh and its children. http://thedambook.com/the-dam-bookshop/ I have all the books and his one on using a high end digital camera instead of a scanner is great, if you already have the camera. Iāve actually put the scanning of slides on hold until I can test some of his ideas.
Getting a proper scanning target to fine tune your individual scanner is also a really good idea.Individual devices of the smae make and model wil have different scanning characteristics.
And once you have the files plan on how to migrate them to new storage media over time as technology changes.
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I suppose the actual viewing experience is in part dependent upon the size, quality, resolution, and scaling of the screen you view them on and your distance from it. There are many variables. But fundamentally the underlying file canāt have more information than the original print. I know I can see the pictures I scanned in the mid-2000s today on my iPad Pro/iMac far better than my family can see the same yellowing prints in paper albums behind plastic with the adhesive turning brown.
Historically I used a simple flatbed scanner set on 200 ppi scanning in the JPEG format. We view those images in a copy of the collection imported into the Photos apps on Mac/IOS, but as I said do not use those apps to either organize or store the actual collection. We use Photos only for the purposes of displaying them on our array of Apple devices. We very much like how they display.
Currently I scan very few pictures as everything new to me is already digital. Were I to start the project today, I suspect I would scan 300 ppi JPEGs to take better advantage of current Retina displays, though I wonder whether that wonderfully-hued Polaroid from the 1970s would look better to me if scanned at 300 ppi than 200 ppi on a 5k iMac scaled normally. I have not tried it so I do not know. But the downsides of a larger file size to me in 2018 are far less than they were in the mid-2000s.
All I can say is that for me personally this works very well, and has for over a decade now.
Iāve heard that the Epson flatbed scanners are really good for this. Honestly Iāve been torn given the time commitment needed and organization to complete this project.
Iām using an Epson Scanner with the VueScan Software. I scan most things at 2400 dpi because even though my scanner claims to have optical scan resolution of 9600 dpi it does not in fact actually perform at that level. 2400 is a compromise between file size and resolution. A few things also get scanned at 4800. For most of my material my scan resolution is far poorer than the original and I am losing data when I scan. However, scanning at a higher resolution than the optical resolution of my scanner wonāt help much. For me 2400 is the minimum I am willing to accept, anything less and I lose WAY too much quality. Iām focusing on a true archival scan to Library of Congress standards. YMMV
The organization is what takes the time. I can strongly suggest you document your procedures once you figure them out.
The time commitment is an issue as well. I have considered sending items off to a scanning service. The only one that has made my list is digmypics.com because they keep everythign in house. I am considering sending a sample of the color negatives, color slides and odd size black and white negatives off to them for scanning at several resolutions to help in deciding what makes sense. I figured that if I sent everything off to them that I want to scan it would cost me about $15K or so. Thatās not exactly in my budget.My plan at this point is to scan and catalog everything and then select subsets that need the higher resolution scan and send those off.
The glass plate negatives take about 12 minutes per image to scan and another 2-3 minutes to finish the post processing and save. The files are about 380MB per image. 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 Color slides I can scan 6 at a time in about 15 minutes. Files are about 70MB, 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 B&W same time to scan but files are closer to 60MB. I havenāt done scanning of color negatives yet and also not much of the odd size B&W negatives I have. Also not scanned any of the 35mm film we have yet as it really does need a higher resolution scan than 2400 to be archival quality.
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Also the file size is something to consider and be aware of as well.
Iām trying out my friendās Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED with VueScan. It does very well with slides and negatives. I was disappointed with prints, though. Iāll try upping the resolution as youāve suggested.
$15k? Ouch! I was gonna go this way with some 126 negatives. Looks like that needs to be rethought.
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Depends on how many items you have. I have several thousand medium format items and over 8000 slides and negatives to scan.
I wish there was a service to just rent out a nice high quality scanner. Especially useful for negative scanners.
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I find that even after all the years I have been using a computer I donāt really have many files that donāt live in there own buckets.
I keep 2 folders in my documents folder, one for code and one for ādocumentsā called actual documents, inside documents is a small collection of different projects which use whatever fold structures make sense for that project.
Receipts at the moment are stored in an S3 bucket broken up by year and I have a speadsheet to serve as a file index while I finish building a system of management for them.
I donāt like everything buckets, and so I donāt like treating my filesystem like one, most of my other documents live in there respective cloud services only
My paperless system began with scanning my file cabinet. So I created folders that mirrored my paper filing, and thatās worked pretty well for me. So I have for example:
šUtilities
āšVerizon
āš2017
āš2018
ā¦and Hazel does most of the actual sorting for me.
Receipts are just in a big folder called Receipts.
Manuals are in a folder called Manuals, and I rename them to include the keywords Iād probably use when searching ā usually what the thing is and the brand name, e.g. dishwasher_maytag.pdf or blender_immersion_kitchenaid.pdf
I browse all of thisl using an app called Leap (which actually feels more modern than the ugly screenshot on their site would suggest) which lets me search within individual folders, or across folders, etc. I could just as easily use Finder, but using Leap is just a mental hack that lets me think of that folder structure as a digital file cabinet separate from my other files. But since itās still Finder-based, I can always move away from Leap to something else if I need to.
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Wow, I used Leap (and Yep, Fresh and Deep) a decade ago. I had no idea they were still alive.
Doesnt look that they have changed much in that time.
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I have individual folders one for each letter of the Alphabet (A-Z), I then have one sub-folder under that for storing my files e.g. F - Family Documents / Family Photos (different folders) or M - Music etc. This way you only have to look under the first letter of what you are looking for. After have a number of different systems, I find this a lot easier to find things.
I agree. Problem would be the shipping, good high end negative scanners are fiddly and can get out of whack easily. I can see that shipping them as a rental would be problematic. Actually Iād just like somone to come out with a GOOD negative scanner in the $1000 dollars or less range that handles all the various old film types/sizes and both B&W and Color. Iād buy one and when I am done with it donate it to our historical society. We are getting lots of donations of old film in more formats than I knew existed, including a lot of nitrate film that really needs to be scanned ASAP then destroyed lest it blow up the museum.
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@OogieM, you have just described the Nikon Coolscan. Still available on eBay in the price range you specified. Out of the box it can only do 35mm but there are hacks to do others.
Interesting. I thought that you could ONLY do 35mm in a CoolScan. I have lots of 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 negatives both color and B&W. Also a fair number of 127 film that is 2.5 x 1.6 inches. I just found an album of about 100 images that are 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 Kodak film dated from 1921-1928 that was buried in some other files.
CoolScan 9000ED. Available on eBay for astronomics prices. I should have bought 50 of them when they were available and make a huge profit. 
I settled on a flatbed scanner to get good previews of my film into my computer and only have the best ones scanned with an Imacon/FlexTight.
I have an Epson Perfection V800 scanner which handles negatives and prints with ease. The bundled Epson software is good but SilverFast is even better. The results are outstanding.
I am working through converting film and prints to digital, its time consuming but fun.