(Note: we are not affiliated with any of the products listed in this article—except Cura™, we are simply providing advice on how to best safeguard and leverage your non-digital media.)
Depending on which generation you come from (or even if you are into analog photography), you may have a few images in non-digital formats, such as albums or large professionally framed photos, or even raw negatives or projector slides. This series of articles will impart solutions for creating a digital archive and enable applications such as Cura™ to help store, curate, and enjoy your precious memories.
How many? What types?
First, you will want to determine the types of analog material you will be digitizing. You may be digitizing newer photographs from your own collection, as well as older photos from parents or grandparents.
If you are not looking for super high-quality replication, some quick-and-easy phone apps will carefully take a photo of your existing prints or negatives. There are several of them on the market of which we have found Google PhotoScan to be the best for prints and negatives. Overall, the app does a nice job, but it does take quite a bit of time, so it is not well suited for digitizing large caches of prints.
From my own experience, when I went looking into the sideboard that my wife and I have used over the years to stash our photos (the good, the bad, and as it turns out some never seen), I found about a thousand photos in print packs, and only about 150 of those had ever made it into a photo album. I also found to my delight, (I will tell you why a bit later) that around 80 percent of these packs still had their negatives tucked in! I also found about 1,500 35 mm back and white and color negatives in a folder from my days in high school when I first started playing with photography and processing them in the school darkroom. Not only that, I came across 20-30 photos from our official wedding album.
Lastly, my wife and I realized we have some older 35 mm slides that were left to us by an aunt and some pre-marriage trips we used to take. In addition, we found old prints that belonged to our parents from their childhoods.
Needless to say, the age of photos I found, and media used ran the gamut, and nearly all of these had not been seen in a very long time. All in, we had about 4,000 negatives, 400 slides, 4000-4200 prints that mostly overlap with the negatives and maybe 200 older prints to digitize.
Goals and a Strategy
So…where do you start? First, think of what your goals are: is it to preserve and archive your photos, or is it to have fun and enjoy the memories with your family?
I set out with the Cura™ service in mind, so I had the following goals set as a first step.
1.) I knew that not every photo I had was going to be good enough or worthy enough for long-term exposure on a large frame.
2.) There was a fair number that would be amazing to see and keep on a screen for a while.
3.) Not every image would be meaningful or appropriate for all audiences.
4.) Having them archived in a safe place would be great allowing ourselves and our kids (and maybe even their kids) to dip into nostalgia when needed.
5.) The last goal was leveraging Cura to help me index all of these images, and merge them with my digital collection.
With those goals in mind, the strategy was to scan all of my media at a reasonable quality as fast as possible without having to physically or mentally make any decision as to whether they were worthy. The decision-making is where the CURA app would come in. I knew it could help me to sort and rank my photos, and would provide a higher-quality (resolution) digital version if need be, for display on a 4k screen, for example.
The idea was that most of the lower-quality, but also potentially nostalgic photos, would be used in the higher-display speed/collage modes on the appropriate digital frame. And other higher-quality photos would be selected into the appropriate display for a longer period.
OK now to digitize. A service or Do it yourself?
Consider a service ?
So now what… I looked at a few of the digitization services that are available like Scan Digital, Scan Café, Memory Box and Legacy Box, each seemed like they would do the job, most offer 600 DPI resolution scanning, which is generally good enough for digital displays or reprinting. But, with about 5,000 items to convert, the most conservative cost estimate was going to range between $1,500 and $2,500.
The Pro’s of using a service are:
- You simply need to find your images, tag them and package them up to send off. Then get back digital versions within a few weeks.
- Very little to no technical knowledge is required.
The Con’s of using a service being:
- Potential cost depending on the size of your collection.
- Nervousness that your valued photos could potentially be lost or damaged.
- Control of your scans, perhaps the service may not totally meet your technical specifications or you don’t want to wait the weeks it will take to complete.
Do it yourself?
So primarily for a few of the reasons listed above, cost, impatience and control over my scans, I choose to discover how to tackle this task myself.
A flat bed photo scanner
So where to start? Several years ago I had purchased a Canon CanoScan Photo Scanner 8800F ($175 at the time in 2009) for some odd scans of photos and negatives. At the time, there were not that many scanners to choose from that provided good native resolution. This scanner offering 4800 x 9600 DPI, turned out to be a winner and still works great connected to a PC using USB. This class of scanner came with the large flatbed for scanning documents and photos, but also has carriers that enable you to scan negatives (2 strips of six -35mm) color or black and white, 4 mounted 35mm slides and 6 x 120 type negatives, or 4 of medium 6 x 6 format negatives. Canon did upgrade the 8800F to the 9000F, but then stopped making photo scanners that had the negative carriers and the type of backlight that is required for negative scanning. However, doing a little research, I found that Epson still offers their Epson V600 scanner for about $230, which would also perform well for this purpose.
Update: I found that using an inexpensive program ($30 US) such as Scanspeeder, a really great tool. It enables you to place multiple prints of on your scanner, do one scan at 600, 800, 1200(if they are small). and it will auto split the scan up into the individual images that can be then enhanced and saved
These scanners are probably a must-have if you plan to go it on your own.
Pros and Cons of using a flatbed photo scanner.
Pros
- Really useful and flexible with different film or print formats or even your kid’s artwork.
- Great quality
- Relatively easy to use with good instruction (I will provide a more detailed post on this)
- Inexpensive
- Scanning many photos — I did discover an inexpensive utility application that can allow you to place multiple photos on at once and its scans, separates and saves them as separate files almost automatically.
Cons
- If you have many negative or slides, it can again be a little tiresome. You can get an extra set of carriers that you can load while the others are scanning that will help, but I did find and review a couple of alternatives for the bulk scanning of negatives and slides (See other posts on bulk methods)
- Can be slow and tiresome having to load print photos on the platen manually (see the pro comment above. I also did not find any better alternatives that worked well)
Scanning 35mm Negatives and Slides in bulk ?
Article on inexpensive bulk solutions