Yep - seeing those fires definitely prompted me to bring this up again to the family. Hoping we can make a decision when we are all together next week!
I’m thinking of using the Epson FastFoto FF-680W which is wireless. My thought is I could use it for the project and then list it on eBay to get back some of my cost.
Almost 2 years ago, I scanned about 7000 photos using the previous version of this scanner, the Epson FastFoto FF-640. My scanner was not wireless and the top optical resolution was 600dpi. I suspect everything else is equal between the two. The scanner was fast and the scan quality was fine. I scanned in groups up to 30 at a time. Misfeedings were extremely rare (2 or more photos pulled in at the same time) and none of original photos were damaged. If you look at the Amazon reviews, some mentioned problems when scanning curled photos. I did not experience this, but that said, hardly any of my original photos were curled. The main problem with this scanner is occasional (frequent???) problems with white lines on the scanned photos resulting from dust/dirt on the inside of the scanner. When I did my scanning I might scan 5 groups of 30 before the lines would appear or it might happen after cleaning and scanning one group of 30. Epson suggests cleaning the scanner after every 300 scans or when you see the lines appear. I have placed a link to the cleaning procedure. While frustrating, it was not a deal-breaker for me (ie - I did not return the scanner). My suggestion is to scan a group of photos, examine the scans and if you see white lines delete the entire group, clean the scanner and redo. After my scanning project was completed I passed the scanner to down another family member. Let me know if you have any questions.
1 Like
Wow! So for your scanning project how long did it take you for the 7000 photos? This summer I’ll have half days on Fridays at work and am willing to do it for a few hours then and even maybe Sunday’s too. For me I’d throw on a podcast and scan and work on other computer work while scanning. Also does it scan to a USB, cloud, or to your computer? I’m also debating storage but might get a Synology which would help. Ideally I’d like to enable family to be able to browse photos by year.
I scanned 7000 with this scanner and another 1000 with a flatbed (larger photos and slides) over a 2 week period. I don’t want to guess at how many hours it took. I scanned it all to an external hard drive and have the original scans backed up to OneDrive and Time Machine, as well as another external SSD.
I will try to post my scanning process soon.
1 Like
Cliff, I’d look forward to a further post on your process. What I’m wondering now is we have photos in photo boxes. Some have them loose, others are in the packaging thing you get when you get them printed at the photo place. I’d imagine they would have the dates or month and year printed on the back. We have a big dining room table and living room rug I could use to help organize.
This is a description of the process I used to scan a large collection of photos and slides. This is the process I used. I am not saying it is the best process. I am not saying that it will make sense to anyone but me. The goal was to make a good digital copy of all of our photos. I was not trying to make museum-quality nor National Geographic-quality images. Just images that would evoke memories. It worked well and gave us what we needed.
I had approximately 8,000 photos and slides to be scanned. Most were in drug-store/photo developer envelopes. Some were in albums or loose in boxes. The slides were in Bell and Howell slide cubes or in plastic slide holders. A few slides were loose in boxes.
Most of the photos that belonged to my wife and I were in some sort of order. Those that belonged to my mother-in-law were poorly organized. In any given envelope there could be a combination of photos that had nothing in common with each other (different time periods, different events, etc).
My first decision: Sort then scan, or scan then sort? This decision was fairly easy. There were approximately 230 envelopes. After opening and sorting two envelopes, I already had about 15 groupings of photos on my dining room table. And making the decision regarding which group each photo belonged in, or whether to discard a photo, was not cut and dry. At this point I decided to scan all of them and sort them later, using Apple Photos.
The second decision that I made was to keep the original photos and destroy/discard all of the negatives. This was a personal preference. For further discussion of this, please refer to the internet.
For the 7000 or so 4” X 6” and smaller photos I used an Epson FastFoto FF-640. The scanner is a fast, sheet-fed scanner with a top resolution of 600 dpi. Epson has a new wireless version capable of 1200 dpi. The main problem with this scanner is occasional problems with white lines on the scanned photos resulting from dust/dirt on the inside of the scanner. Epson suggests cleaning the scanner after every 300 scans or when you see the lines appear.
My scanning process: Remove the contents of the photo envelope. Place photos in scanner. Scan photos @ 600 dpi. The software will ask you to name the batch of photos before it starts scanning. The naming convention I used for each scanned image, was a letter followed by a 3-digit number. The scanner software adds a sequential number to each image. So the images from the first envelope were named A001_0001, A001_0002, etc. Second envelope, A002_0001, etc. The scanned images were placed in folders named with the prefix (A001, A002, etc).
After the photos were scanned, I checked for quality. If the quality was good I went to the second envelope. If the images showed the white lines or other problems, I discarded the scanned images, cleaned the scanner, and repeated the process. After each envelope was scanned, I wrote the number in a blank book with some short notes about the photos in the envelope (year, event, people, places, etc). I then placed the original photos in new acid-free/lignin-free archival envelopes labeled with the prefix (first envelope A001). I destroyed/discarded any negatives and placed the original envelopes in the recycle bin.
My process for the 1000 slides and other photos (larger photos and less flexible photos, like Polaroids) was to use the Epson Perfection V550, a flatbed scanner that has accessories for scanning slides/negatives. The process was similar to that outlined above. In general, the slides were scanned at 4800 dpi and the photos 600 dpi. The naming convention for the slides was S00x_xxxx and L00x_xxxx for the lager photos. The original slides were placed in the archival envelopes and labelled accordingly. The larger photos were placed in regular large envelopes and labelled as well.
We ended up with approximately 8000 scanned images. The 315 envelopes with the original photos were placed in boxes and stored in a closet. Each box is labelled with the name of the contents. They take up about 9 cubic feet of closet space. We have a notebook with the descriptions of the contents of each envelope. So, every photo is cross-referenced between the original photo, the scanned image, as well as the notebook. This should make it easier if I were to want to find the original photo for rescanning or sending to a relative.
All of the scanned images were imported into a new Apple Photos library. All images were given the same keyword NoAlbum. This is where the sorting and discarding take place. This is the most time-consuming part. This took about 2-3 months. I did a little every day. I went through each photo and either discarded it or placed it into an album. My goal was to place each photo in only one album. Once I put a photo in an album I would remove the keyword, NoAlbum. That way when I started sorting each day, I could start with the images that weren’t in any album. Once I had every photo in an album, I added a keyword ALB followed by a 3 digit number. First album keyword is ALB001, etc. I will eventually add additional keywords and allow photos to be in multiple albums. Re:keywords… OogieM has a great post here: Editing image metadata of digitized analogue photos?
Currently I have the scanned images backed up to Time Machine, as well as an external SSD and MS OneDrive. Because this Apple Photos library is not my system library, I am planning of putting a copy in iCloud.
4 Likes
This is really extensive though based on your other posts I expected it. If we were talking in real life I’d immediately buy you a drink or food as thanks for the detail and extensiveness. Also if I’m being honest throw this up in the Cool Workflows section as its own post, I think it deserves further recognition. Also if you are going to MacStock I’ll see you there.
As to your comment, I like your process overall. I find it interesting that you won’t be getting rid of the photos. I say that as the trendiness of the KonMari method lately. I think for me personally with that many of the photos I’ll scan them all but then sort through and not keep all of them. The older family photos certainly but some of those shots aren’t worth keeping and are duds.
I think a bit different in my case from yours is that I’m a Lightroom user. I love Apple Photos but wouldn’t want the photos to be held hostage if for whatever reason it became corrupt. As of now, I’m storing the large majority of my photos in Lightroom and my iOS photos and videos in Photos.
I’d be looking at the 1200 dpi version and I’d go ahead and scan at the 1200 dpi resolution. I like the process of your numbering scheme. Also your thing about the quality. I don’t have too many slides but the images would be the priority right now.
Interesting your process of sorting and discarding. If you decided a photo wasn’t worth keeping would you just delete it from your Apple Photos library?
This is a good old school solution! Invest in an camera stand and remote trigger, and a put every page/photo under a plate of glass. It is also nesessary with a polaroid-filter on the camera lense to remove the refections from the glass, but in this way you can digitalize a box of photos in rather short time. This method will not work with negatives/slides, though 
1 Like
Yes. With a slide adapter.
This is the only part that made me shudder. The negative has so much more information compared to the print that I can’t imaging getting rid of them. I’d probably do it the other way round, scan the negatives and toss the photos.
2 Likes
It can with either a slide adapter or a lightbox you place the slides on.
Good if you only have several hundred slides, not so good for many thousands of them.
Yes, I knew that part would turn some heads (I read all about it on the internet). I completely understand the quality issues with the negatives being better than the paper photos as a scanning source. Again, just personal preference. I am happy with the quality of scanned images.
How much space do these photos take up? I already have 700 GB of photos I’ve taken over the past 15 years.
5 TB here. But it`s a non-issue, storage is cheap.
1 Like
The photos take up ~14 GB
1 Like
Yeah by my math it’ll be 200-300 GB for my estimated amount of photos I have to scan
1 Like
Hey guys,
Even paying around with the idea of going to a company or backup photos myself. I tried one of the high end Kodak ps80 scanners and I’ll give them props they definitely fast but to own it is crazy expensive in my opinion and limited to pc. Based on some research I’ve grabbed a epson 680 and started scanning some photos really impressed so far. It advertises you can mix and max different size photos in one scan so I did some 4x6, 5x6 in different orientations the photos turned out great only jammed once and didn’t cause any harm to my photos. I’ll share more as I use it
I have that same scanner. I found it worked better if I tried to match sizes. The other thing you need to watch out for is vertical whites lines on some scans. This happens when it needs cleaning. Their website shows the technique for cleaning. What I would do is scan one batch, check to see if it had the lines. If it did, I discarded that set of scans, cleaned the scanner, and re-scanned those photos. I scanned at best quality and was happy with those results.
1 Like
Great advice 100% agree. I generally clean the scanner before any major scanning just to be safe.
1 Like