[ghaff]

I’ve used scancafe a number of times and actually wrote an early-on review for CNET.

One general piece of advice is that before you go crazy, think about what you really care about saving. There’s a cost to scanning of course. There’s also a cost to metadata and other cataloging so that you can actually find what you’ve scanned.

For photos everything is in Lightroom with at least a modicum of organization. When my dad decided he’d like a digital picture frame of older family pics it literally took me about 30 minutes to pull together.

[toomuchtodo]

This is a good point. For my use cases, I get a bulk rate, and dump everything into digital storage and a processing workflow. Once digital, it's a future problem, but at least it'll be preserved on disk and tape somewhere. Apple didn't have machine vision in photos when I started doing this, for example, so I lean heavily on Moore's Law (very broadly speaking about tech acceleration) that future tech will solve (facial recognition, OCR, machine vision metadata generation, generative AI) so save, digitize, preserve now when it is cheap to do so. Once gone, it is lost to the sands of time.

[ghaff]

It’s certainly use case specific. In my case, less is more. A fairly heavily-curated collection of photos is more valuable to me than a data dump that may preserve some diamond in the rough that future tech may do something interesting with.

Photos of a historically interesting event? Sure. But for old family pics I’m happy to have hundreds of curated photos of mostly people and call it a day.