How Do I Digitize and Share a Ton of Old Family Photos?

[MULTIZ321]

How Do I Digitize and Share a Ton of Old Family Photos?
By David Murphy/ Tech 911/ Lifehacker/ lifehacker.com

"Welcome back to another week of Tech 911—Lifehacker’s advice column that’s designed to answer your most pressing and peculiar questions about technology. This week, we’re taking a question from someone who wants to find a solid photo-storage service for a special project. I’ll let Lifehacker reader Joel explain:

“My mother passed away recently. I have hundreds of our old family photos, many well over 100 years old from overseas, and would like to scan them and make a secure cloud gallery that is searchable for my extended family by subject or name. I have a decent scanner; what software should I use for the cloud gallery?”....."

Photo: Michal Jarmoluk (Pixabay)


Richard

 

[tompalm]

I bought the Eason Photo Scanner at Best Buy and scanned over 2000 photos. It took hours or about 15 hours to do the job, but 100 times faster than doing it one at a time. All my pics are on my iPad and iPhone. It was worth doing.

 

[pittle]

I bought the Eason Photo Scanner at Best Buy and scanned over 2000 photos. It took hours or about 15 hours to do the job, but 100 times faster than doing it one at a time. All my pics are on my iPad and iPhone. It was worth doing.

I have an Epson flatbed scanner that does a good job with scanning photos, but, it takes a while. Is yours one of the smaller ones that self-feeds? I have thought about getting one of those. Which model do you have?

 

[tompalm]

Here is some info I sent to a friend. The scanner was fast, but it still takes a long time. That was a few years ago and I sold it. Don’t remember which model it was.

I was thinking about my project. It took me about an hour to get the photos out of each album. It took another hour for each album to throw away photos and organize them. The scanning goes pretty fast as long as nothing gets jammed or stuck. After each group is done, you need to check and make sure they came out ok. I used Picasa to edit them and did a quick crop and automatic color feature called “feeling lucky”. It really made a difference in a lot of the photos that had already lost color. Anyway, that is why it took a couple days for me and it is why you need to get rid of as many photos as you can.

 

[1st Class]

I used a flatbed scanner for a small portion of photos I need to scan. Photoshop Elements has a feature that will separate the photos each into their own file, then crop and straighten. I placed as many as would fit on the flatbed then let PE do the rest. It went pretty fast but I was only working with about 150 photos at that time. I found the easiest way to scan negatives was to scan as a photo, then revert the image. Like magic, it turned the negative to a photo! I'm not an expert in Photoshop but this was pretty easy to do. Very time-consuming for larger numbers of photos, however, so I'm working in small groups.

 

[rapmarks]

I just received a scanner for slides and negatives.
I have boxes of my mother in laws and right now I am weeding out any that would be family. Several hundred from her second husband on trips, and I am not saving.
My mother in law took loads of photos were she had someone stand in front of something then walked as far away as she needed to get the whole building in the frame. She never learned from her mistake so my keep pile is really small.
She had a stereo camera and those are going to be a problem. Graduation pictures are of the entire stage from the back of the room.
Things labeled Christmas are mostly of the tree. But there are a few gems in there.