Scanning Photos Archives • Scan Your Entire Life

My Inspiring Photo Scanning Progress Report for April 2012

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Scanning Photos, Featured Post, My Blog

Welcome to my third monthly progress report!

Last month I covered two complete months of scanning, but I learned that was just too much to talk about!

So this time is only one month and it’ll be a lot shorter.

What This Progress Report Is Really About:

Every month, I am posting a detailed report — just like this one — sharing with you how far I have come with my goal to scan and restore my entire 10,000+ family photo collection.

By doing so, I hope to inspire you to do the same!

In my first progress report, I set a goal for myself to do a little bit of work on my collection every single day. I shoot for about an hour a day which turns out to be about 30 scans a day. And I am going to record and detail each one of them so that you can learn from my transparency.

I don’t want to be “that guy” — a guy that tells you how you should scan your own photos but then sends all of my own to a scanning service to do the work for me.

13 More Reasons Why You Should Already Be Scanning Your Photo Collection

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Scanning Photos, Restoring Digitals, Storing Originals

Guest post by: Art Taylor

If you’ve been reading the post comments on this website in the last month, I’m sure you’ve seen 1 or 7 detailed comments from a man named Art Taylor.

I haven’t met someone in some time who is as passionate about preserving photographs as he is. And since he’s been so generous sharing his scanning experience with others, I couldn’t help but take him up on his offer to write a few guest posts for us.

Art has been an amateur photographer for over 40 years, taking close to 50,000 or more slides and negatives on film. But, what really got my attention was his love for trains. Even though I can’t say I have ever ridden a real train — just miniature ones in amusement parks — I just love them. Most of Art’s photo collection was taken of trains and railroad-related subjects.

My Inspiring Progress Report for February – March 2012

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Scanning Photos, My Blog

Hey, welcome to my second progress report!

Every month, I am posting a detailed report just like this one sharing with you how far I have come with my goal to scan and restore my entire 10,000+ family photo collection.

By doing so, I hope to inspire you to do the same!

In my first progress report, I set a goal for myself to do a little bit of work on my collection every single day, and I am going to detail each one of them so that you can learn from my transparency.

I don’t want to be “that guy” — a guy that tells you how you should scan your own photos but then sends all of my own to a scanning service to do the work for me.

I have absolutely nothing against these services. In fact, I love them!

But, I want to not only prove to myself that I can do this, but more importantly, I want to prove to you how almost anyone can scan and organize their own photo collection too!

It’s not impossible. It’s just about putting in the time, energy and devotion.

How Quickly You Could Scan Your Entire Photo Collection — What I Discovered From My First Week of Scanning

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Jun 4, 2017 | Scanning Photos, Featured Post

So you have a closet with boxes full of old prints and slides that you are dying to have scanned and neatly organized on your computer.

The problem is, you’re worried about it either costing you way too much money to send it to a scanning service, or taking too much of your precious free time to scan them yourself on a flatbed scanner.

Does this sound EXACTLY like your dilemma?

I’d like to share with you my experience back scanning photos for the first week. If you want to make scanning your own photos fit into your busy and hectic life, I think my experience here might give you an idea how much time will be involved and how many photos you can easily get through.

My Inspiring Progress Report for January 2012

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Scanning Photos, SYEL Site News

This is going to be the first of many monthly — if not every 2 months — reports that I am planning on publishing that will summarize my most recent progress to digitize my family’s photo collection.

Scanning, organizing, labeling, and color correcting an enormous family photo collection is a major project that I am obviously not taking lightly.

In each of these reports, the first thing I’m going to do is mention what I’ve been doing the past month or 2 to either work towards my personal goal with my collection or just to improve this website.

Next I will reveal my latest “Scanning & Editing” count that will show you exactly how far I have come with my collection from the last report.

And lastly, I will finish up with the most important things I have recently learned that I think you will benefit in hearing and possibly what I have planned for the near future.

Q&A: What’s the Best DPI or Resolution to Scan Your Film Negatives?

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Scanning Photos

“Hi there. Since you have and use an Epson Perfection V600 I wanted to ask you what is the optimal scan settings for scanning film negatives?

Right now I use 12800 dpi, but I have a feeling it’s overkill and all my indoor night time pictures have a lot of grain. I certainly appreciate whatever advice you have to offer.” ~ Walter Ho.

Walter, thanks for writing me. Let me see if I can help you out with this one.

I would say your gut feeling is right on — 12800 dpi is going to be overkill for negatives. Hopefully you haven’t scanned too many of them if you want to do them over.

BritePix Review: The Ultimate In-Depth and Personal Photo Scanning Service Review

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Scanning Photos

I love that we have scanning services out there because I think it would be ignorant of me to assume every one of us with a collection of prints, negatives or slides, who wants a digital version of them, is willing to scan their own photos by hand.
“Excuse me ma’am. Um, but could you like, um, put those cotton gloves on? Please? Yeah. Um. No. How about the thicker ones. Over there. Yeah, those.”

So with this in mind, let me say, doing this review was a big — scratch that — huge step for me. This was the first time I have ever sent any of my family’s photos to a scanning service — or even out of my sight.

But, for me, it’s always been a hard transaction to consider — this whole idea of sending my irreplaceable photographs to a company or someone I have never met and expect everyone who handles them to care for them the same way I do.

Scanning Your Film Negatives vs. Prints: An Interesting Comparison

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Oct 26, 2018 | Scanning Photos

When you start scanning your photographs — if you’re lucky — you get to make this choice:

Do you want to scan your original camera negatives, or the prints made from them?

And what I mean by lucky is that many of us didn’t hold onto our negatives when we had prints made from them. We got what we wanted when took them to the Photo Bug or the Photo Hut or the drug store down the street — a stack of photos to stick in our photo albums. So, I guess a lot of us probably felt safe tossing out the film negatives.

Shocking Demo Shows Why You Need to Scan and Save Your Bad Photographs Too!

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated May 29, 2017 | Restoring Digitals, Scanning Photos

I think we are almost to the point where I can safely say there is no such thing as a bad photograph.

Aside from the photos that are accidentally shot off or the ones where the camera is completely set wrong (for example in the more complicated manual modes), every photo — even the “bad” ones — will one day be a few clicks away from being usable.

Photo Magic is Already Here or Just Around the Corner!

In October of 2011, Jue Wang, senior research scientist at Adobe, showed off a jaw-dropping “sneak peak” of some technology that will make all of you who threw out all of your so called “bad photos” wish you had that day back to do over again!