Ask HN: Best way to digitize old family photos and slides at home

[stollercyrus]

Hi HN,

With the growing number of wildfires in California, I've been thinking about the best ways to digitize old family photos and slides. I imagine there are a number of services that you could send boxes of photos, but since I'm at home anyway, I figure this may be a good project to tackle.

I'm curious if you have recommendations for the best ways to do this. In particular:

- What is the best way to scan photos that are laminated in photo albums?

- What are some good tools for digitizing old slides?

- What is the best way to efficiently load photos for digitizing?

I'm sure there are plenty of other questions I should be asking, so if any of you have done this already, I'd love to learn from you experience.

[mceachen]

I've had several beta users of PhotoStructure share with me how they got all their slides and prints digitized. It's seems like there's really only two ways:

1. Do it yourself. One of my beta testers has had good results with the Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner. It handles both prints and slides.

2. Pay someone to do it. Scan Cafe https://www.scancafe.com/ has good reviews.

In either case:

1. Make sure you scan at a reasonable resolution. Don't scan higher than the native resolution of the scanner. Film grain on slides seldom exceeds 2500-3200dpi, and prints seldom resolve higher than 250-300 dpi. Save scans as high-quality JPEG (85-95%) unless you can scan higher than 24-bit color, then use TIFF.

2. Consider scanning the back of prints if they have anything written on them.

3. Try to capture the date the image was taken. Some software (like PhotoStructure) will infer captured-at from the filename or parent directory if it's missing from EXIF headers. yyyy-mm-dd is a good format.

4. Have a reliable way to store all this work. I had a number of beta users ask me about this so I wrote it up on my blog: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/

[adingus]

In my experience the worst part of digitizing photos is the time it takes to load the scanner.

I have about 300 slides I'd like to digitize and on something like an Epson v550 you can only load 4 slides at a time and scanning each slide takes about 3 minutes each. Negative strips can be even worse if you try and manually select each frame. Retouching is easy in comparison as Lightroom auto functions do pretty good on most photos.

If you can design a loading & scanning system that can process as fast as you can audit/retouch photos it'll make the process a lot easier. Even automating the loadin and letting it run overnight would be nice.

This is just for normal people photos. If you're a photographer you're going to scrutinize each photo even more and you'll either require a lot more time to retouch or much better software & hardware for scanning to get the color accuracy, sharpness & automatic scratch/dust removal.

[runjake]

I bought a Canon 300 LiDE flatbed scanner and I think I used Image Capture.app in macOS.

Why? I paid ~$70 for the scanner, which is slightly less than what it would've cost to have Walgreen's or somebody do it. Also, the Canon scanner the local Walgreen's stores used was an older Canon model that had significantly less resolution.

Once I got used to the software (~20 mins), I scanned several hundreds photos over the course of a couple hours.

You can scan a laminated photo album page, and if you keep light from leaking in, it's great.

In the beginning, I was trying to find the highest DPI scanner I could, but then read a review on the LiDE 300 on Wirecutter or something, where they mentioned that those old printed photos are far lower resolution that you'd think and that the LiDE 300 would exceed that. Damned if they weren't right.