Scanning Photos Archives • Scan Your Entire Life

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 | Featured Post, Scanning Photos

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!

My Experience Learning to Scan Our 1700 Photo Collection

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

Guest post by:
Peter Fuller

Today, I would like to share something a little different here on “Scan Your Entire Life.” Usually it’s just me going on and on about my experience dealing with my photo collection. But not this time.

A couple months ago, Peter Fuller, a fellow reader of this website wrote and shared with me his experience getting started on the project of scanning his entire photo collection.

We wrote back and forth several times discussing the details of his workflow. He had questions for me and I had some questions for him. I became immediately intrigued hearing his story shopping for a particular model of scanner he wished to purchase where he lives.

At some point, I received an email from Peter asking me this:

If I sent you a piece about my experiences/ learning’s scanning photos, would you be prepared to publish it?

I had never thought about having guest posts on my site so soon — but how could I refuse!

PNG vs TIFF — The Format That Won’t Hurt Your Scanned Photos

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Dec 27, 2019 | Scanning Photos

Q&A – “From your site and the other information I’ve found on the net, I think we should scan our photo collections in TIFF, at 600 dpi, using your naming convention / workflow. You don’t cover TIFF versus other formats in your articles, but I see you are using that format and there seems to be general acceptance that it is the best format for archiving. What do you think of the PNG format?”

Peter, that is a great question. And you’re right, up until now I have not covered what I feel is the best file format(s) to save scanned photos with. But, as you astutely noticed, I did sort of allude to my personal choice in a couple of my posts. Especially in some of my images I used in my 3-part “naming convention” series you brought up called “What Everyone Ought to Know When Naming Your Scanned Photos.”

The Simplest Way to Know Which Photos You Have Already Scanned

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated May 17, 2017 | Scanning Photos, Storing Originals

Unless you have found a way to scan your entire photo collection in a pre-organized “beginning to end” kind of way, I’ve found you’re going to need a way to know tomorrow, or possibly months later, whether or not you have already scanned a particular photograph.

And you’re going to want to know by just looking at a print or slide in front of you – without booting up your computer to do a search. Trust me.

The problem I discovered when I started scanning my collection was unless I was immediately moving the slides or prints I had just scanned to a different storage place – a new photo album or new archival pages for example – I would sometimes forget whether or not I had scanned some of them!