Creatrope

Some lessons learned while scanning photographs using Fujitsu ScanSnap and Google Picasa.

About 20 years worth of photos

First, re quality. This is strictly a feel-good safety backup. If you want to do this right, at archival quality, you need to scan the slides or negative film and you need to think about professional help or guidance. My goal was to actually see what I’ve shot and collected over the years, and have a fighting chance to recover the memories and photos if something happened to the originals.

The ScanSnap scans photographs at 600 DPI which makes an acceptable scan, by my standards. Blowing it up is likely out of the question, but a normal print from this is actually fairly good.

My digital photo collection was reasonably well organized and backed up. For my physical photos all I had was the photos in four plastic shoeboxes and few, if any, negatives (and completely disorganized). I had taken the basic precautions of storing the negatives apart from the photos to protect against loss.

I started scanning year by year as my collection was already sorted by year. The ScanSnap preferred photos of the same size and most were 3×5 or 4×6. It would throw errors if the photos were too disparate in size. I understand the new ScanSnap S500 model may do a bit better in this regard. I did them in batches of 30-40 photos and found that I could continuously feed the ScanSnap (which my son figured out on his own once I ‘enlisted’ him). What a breakthrough! Within five evenings, the entire collection was scanned.

If you’d like to see how the scanner behaves in regular document mode click here.

The scanning does pretty much lock-up the computer. You may want to set up a scanning ’station’ on an old box which is not your main computer.The scanner needs to be cleaned fairly often as dust from old photos can create streaks. You need to glance at the output in the ScanSnap Organizer once in in a while to ensure you are not getting streaks. I cleaned it every 200-300 photos. It takes a few seconds. An old eyeglass cleaning kit and cloth works well here. Although it’s easy to clean, take some care.

The scanner does not like feeding very small photos less than 1.5 inches. It will not initiate a scan if you jam the feeder guides too close together. I found, however, that I could widen the feeder guides a bit, then put the photo right up against the edge of one of the feeder guides and it would generally feed satisfactorily.

The unit includes a ‘carrier sheet’ which is intended to hold smaller or odd shaped items during scanning. I found I did not use this much in practice as I got good at finding the sweet spot for getting the scanner to accept even odd-shaped photos (like the cool vertical ones from the photo booths).I found the scanner suprisingly forgiving of slightly bent photos as long as they were fed singly, but any vestigial tape or staples need to be removed.

Picasa works well enough, but I found it took some time to get familiar with it. The thumbnail view makes it convenient to use your human visual prowess to scan for features and special photos.

My mother had a done an excellent job annotating old photos – on the back of the photo. I had no patience to transcribe these, but didn’t want to lose this valuable info, so I scanned the photos duplex, capturing both sides of the photos. This makes two separate JPEGs unfortunately. Of course, I’m relying on the file system/timestamp and Picasa to keep them together, which is not great, but it’s better than nothing.

I’m open to better suggestions! I thought about scanning them to duplex PDF but found that unattractive.

Photos all scanned in? Congratulations.

Now make two duplicate DVD-Rs or CD-Rs with all your photos, including any digital ones you started with, label it with a safe marker, put it inside a jewel case and get these out of your house.

Consider bringing one to work, which probably has fairly decent fire protection and security, or a safe deposit box, or sending it to a family member or close friend. If you are trying to protect against earthquake, giving it to a neighbor is probably not a good idea.

Now fire/theft/floods have a much reduced chance of taking something you can’t replace – your photos.