I love digital photography! That said, I have 20 + years of hard copy photos I want to organize so the family can enjoy them.
Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks.
Scan Them
You need to get a scanner and photo management software. A scanner may come with some form of this software, but you are probably better off with a more feature rich 3rd party program. If you have a digital camera now, I hope you already have such software that you could utilize with your newly digitized photos. Depending on the amount of photos we are talking about, this could be quite a painstaking process, especially if you are considering retouching any of them with a Photoshop type program. Whether you are on a PC or Mac computer also comes into play, but that is another conversation altogether. Your first order of business: Get a Scanner!
I like ACDSee
Some digital cameras come with a stripped-down version of it (as did one of my Canons) and I liked it enough to buy the whole program. $79.95 as I remember, comes with an organizing feature (thumbnails & folders), an editor for touching up your shots and a projects feature.
Of course, you have to scan every print first. I have started converting my 30 years of 35mm slides to digutal, and it is a slow process.
Jim
What to do?
Still trying to figure it out, but I’ve made a start.
All my digital photo’s are eventually backed up to CD’s. I use good quality CD’s. I only print out those that I want printed out.
That being said, my conundrum is what to do with the photo albums (about 100) and boxes of photo’s that I inherited from my parents. Some of the photo’s are over 100 years old and some of historical significance. The scanner I have is too slow to scan this many photo’s.
Andy
In the future, I’ll probably pick up a high speed scanner and scan all of these photo’s, put them on CD’s. Empty all the albums and store the original photo’s in some secure boxes.
Bulk Photo Scanner
A couple of years ago, I checked around for a scanner that could do batch scanning of photos - and there was one out there, a Canon if I remember correctly.
Can’t find it right now, but here’s a link to Google’s first response to “scanner to scan batch photos…”