Scanning Old Family Photos

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Tom and Margi

Tom and Margi

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Mar 3, 2005
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We'll be volunteering for Oregon Fish and Wildlife this summer which should give us plenty of free time to tackle a much procrastinated project.  We have boxes and albums of old family photos.  We would like to scan these photos to a DVD.  Many of them are more than 50 years old and quite fragile.  Some are in albums, are black and white, and have the little sticky corner fasteners which were so popular back in the day. 

We had an old flatbed scanner that was obsolete and was pitched when we went full-time.  My scanner/printer combo is way too slow to be considered. 

Has anyone on the forum done this already?  What should be be looking for in a scanner?  Speed is important because of the sheer number of photos.  We have Adobe Elements 3 software.  Would this be good to use?  What other software might be recommended.  Any other suggestions are welcome.

Margi

 
I purchased a CanoScan 8400F which has given me good results with old photographs and 35mm slides. I paid about $100 at J&R Electronics. I believe the 8400 is no longer available, but I am sure there is a later and better scanner available.
 
Margi,

With old photographs you're best served with a flatbed scanner, even though it will be slow.  I would try to remove the photos from the albums for scanning so you get the best image possible.  I've had good success with Epson flatbed scanners, but there are others just as good.  Windows XP has a built in wizard for scanning documents, but the quality of the scan is a function of the scanner driver, not the software.  There are several good, free, image handling programs, so find one that you're comfortable with.  I just use the tools built in to Windows XP for our photo handling.

Elements is more of a photo processor program, so you may want something else for indexing.  Or as I do, use the basic tools in Windows and just put the scan images into folder under the My Photos folder.  The hard part is scanning in the photos in the first place, you can always index and edit them later.
 
What about using a digital camera on a tripod? May be used without removing prints from the album pages.

Someone more knowledgable will have to comment on what megapixel count is necessary to be better than a flatbed scanner.
 
While a digital camera is one way to digitize old photos, it's even more time consuming than scanning, and I don't think they don't make a CCD with the resolution of even an inexpensive scanner.  The typical scanner will be capable of 1200dpi or more.  A 4x6" photo scanned at 1200dpi is over 34 megapixels.
 
Thanks for your comments Ned, Russ and Wayne.  I'm printing the information to use as we start our search for the scanner.

Margi
 
Margi:

    I use a Canon 9950F Scanner and it is capable of scanning negatives as well as prints.  Can do 35mm, medium format, etc..  It will produce the kinds of files you need.  It comes with its own software and some correction capabilities as well.  I highly recommend this scanner.  I have done hundreds of scans.

 
Ron,

What resolution are you using for scanning photos & slides? Any different resolution for B&W vs color?
 
Tom:

    You can scan from 75dpi up to 1200 dpi.  300 dpi will work for smaller printed images, but if you want to get a large enough file for large prints, then I suggest the 1200 dpi.

 
Tom and Margi said:
Thanks, Ron.  We'll certainly check into the Cannon scanner.
Click to expand...

Margi

We have the same printer and Marlene loves it. She's been scanning all of her family picture albums and when that is finally done, she has about 5,000 slide to do :D I could have gotten by with a much lesser quality scanner, since my needs are primarily copying.
 
I'm about ready to start on the photo phase of my family's genealogy so it will be interesting to see how our Canon works for that.  In the meantime, I have three fragile family bibles that I don't want to keep opening and closing.  Jerry took high-res digital photos of the cover and data pages and it works GREAT!  What's really neat is that you can zoom in on names and dates that might be difficult to read otherwise.  In a couple of cases we saw that name spellings or dates were changed or extremely faded and now I can make them out.

Digitizing photos has the additonal advantage that you can share them with others.  One of Jerry's distant cousins was the end of her line and her husband didn't know what to do with her family bible, etc.  I was able to digitize everything of importance and post them on ancestry.com with the result that several people found "lost" ancestors.  It's nice to know we can help one another so much better now.

ArdraF

 
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