Ask archival el-jay

[rdhdsnippet]

Maybe the hive can help...

I'm scanning old family photos, and I have three questions about the process, from a technical standpoint. And oh-by-the-way, I am working on a Mac. Though I could move much of the process to a PC if you gave me a ghost of a reason I needed to, as the scanner is wireless

Comments

[beowabbit]

PS:

3. I really... really really REALLY want to be able to put EXIF data in these pictures. Specifically I want to be able to put in a date, a place, and a comment with the names of the people (I don't mind hijacking some standard but unused field for this). The reason I want this in the EXIF data is that I want it to STAY with the picture, I don't want to be dependent on a particular program or website down the road.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I do. And when I post pictures to my own website (as opposed to Flickr or the like), I have a script that automatically extracts the captions from the image files themselves to make an index page.

[rdhdsnippet]

Stop making me wish i was a linux geek, please. :P To my knowledge I don't even have a place that I could do that even if I knew how, but it sounds super cool!

[jd_trouble]

How many pictures are we talking about here Petal? Are you doing this because you need a project or are you just looking to have the data? After spending months researching the best way to scan hundreds of slides for my dad, I wound up packing them all in a box and sending them off to ScanCafe.

It takes them a couple of months, but they really did an excellent job on my slides, returned them all in great condition, charged a reasonable amount for the service, and saved me hundreds of hours of my time. Before you invest in a particular process, you might want to check them out.

www.scancafe.com

[rdhdsnippet]

We're talking, at the moment, two about-double-the-size-of-a-banker's-box moving boxes full of albums. I am looking to have the data - I have plenty of things to do with my non-existent spare time. ;)

It absolutely does look like a great service, thank you for the pointer - I'll definitely keep them in mind for the negatives I come across. Unfortunately I don't think they'll work for my current purposes - it's far too expensive to get them back in a professionally usable format, for one - .psd or .tiff almost doubles the cost, I have WAY too many pictures, and frankly, there's no way in hell I'm shipping turn of the century family photos to Bangladore.

[voltbang]

Scan at the highest quality you can. Why throw away data? Once it's gone, it's gone. You can always store extra bits. If you have some application that requires fewer bits, you can convert down, but you can't bring back bits that have been discarded.

[rdhdsnippet]

I could scan them at 9600dpi, but I'd never finish the job. Honestly our new scanner is one of the first we'e had that I think I could contemplate tackling it with at all. The sheer volume of pictures is daunting.

I just started on the older pictures and am doing them at 1200 vice the ginormous album that I just finished at 600. There is certainly a difference in the quality, but the jump from 600 to 1200 was *significant* in terms of time. You're absolutely right, I don't care about the size of the documents. I think I'll do a couple test scans at 2400 tonight for comparison.

[rdhdsnippet]

Sorry. Apparently 4800 is the best I can do, not 9600. Morning brain!

[hannnahkl]

Do you have Bridge installed along with Photoshop? If so, it'll let you edit any associated metadata or add more pretty easily.

[rdhdsnippet]

No clue.... I'll ask the hus-bean!

[webqatch]

Once you get them all scanned, there's a (PC I know, don't know about Mac) software app that I'd highly recommend for batch processing (rotation, renaming, color twiddling, whatever...

Faststone Image Viewer

It's free and it's fantastic.

[rdhdsnippet]

I'll check it out, thanks for the pointer! :)