My Inspiring Progress Report for February – March 2012
If it’s important to you, you will find a way.
If not, you’ll find an excuse.
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.
Quotes
In that same report, I started off with a nice inspirational quote, and I think I am going to keep with it.
I love motivational quotes. It quickly puts things into perspective. And for these reports, the quotes will continue to be about your struggles — our struggles — with managing what feels like monumental tasks associated with our collections.
How This Report is Different
What’s different about this progress report from ones I will be doing in the future is that it’s made up of 2 complete months worth of my scanning and editing (restoration) work. From here on out though, there will be a separate report for each month.
I admit, it was probably a mistake to do 2 months here. But, since I put out an article about my first week back scanning and its accomplishments shortly after this last progress report, I thought it would be too soon to put out another one.
But then, after seeing how much information I have built up, I now know I should have broken it up into two. Oh well — lesson learned! 🙂
My Scanning Progress for February 2012
Alright, let’s get to it. Here is a chart that shows you all of the scanning and editing work I did in the month of February.
I didn’t get a clean start at the first of the month. When I made up my mind to start scanning a little bit each day, I was already 10 days into February. So the first month here is going to be a little light.
Note: If any of these charts are just too much for you, that’s completely okay! Seriously. It’s okay to just skip past some of them. As part of my desire to be transparent, I am listing all of this data for anyone who finds this interesting and helpful.
My Scanning Progress — February 2012 | |||
---|---|---|---|
Date | Scanned | Type | Time |
Feb 10 | 10 | Prints | 43 mins |
Feb 11 | 62 | Slides | 240 mins |
Feb 12 | — | — | — |
Feb 13 | 13 | Slides | 23 mins |
Feb 14 | 20 | Slides | 68 mins |
Feb 15 | 28 | Slides | 58 mins |
Feb 16 | 29 | Slides | 62 mins |
Feb 17 | 32 | Slides | 58 mins |
Feb 18 | 38 | Slides | 67 mins |
Feb 19 | 34 | Slides | 83 mins |
Feb 20 | 28 | Slides | 35 mins |
Feb 21 | 29 | Slides | 65 mins |
Feb 22 | 30 | Slides | 57 mins |
Feb 23 | 32 | Slides | 58 mins |
Feb 24 | 30 | Slides | 73 mins |
Feb 25 | 28 / 19 | Prints / Slides | 106 mins |
Feb 26 | 32 | Prints | 43 mins |
Feb 27 | 32 | Slides | 58 mins |
Feb 28 | 32 | Slides | 59 mins |
Feb 29 | 22 | Slides | 52 mins |
My Goal
My goal was to set the alarm clock an hour earlier than I used to. This way I could get up every morning and get in at least an hours worth of scanning before going to work. Then on the weekends, I would sleep in a bit, but still scan first thing before doing anything else. It would just become my daily routine.
Sometimes I went over 60 minutes, but other times I went under. It just depended on the day, how early I woke up that morning, and possibly how challenging the photos were to get a good scan.
After several days, 30 started to become the magic number. It seemed like 30 slides or prints was a good number that I could easily hit in an hour or less. It has basically become my new challenge each day — hit 30 scans before the clock clicks one hour.
Notice, you can see that just 3 days in, I had already taken a day off. This wasn’t laziness or a lack of devotion. Sincerely. I was that sick that day with a fever. I was actually that sick the next day too but I made myself scan anyway. Now that’s devotion!
Deciding Which to Scan Each Day — Prints or Slides?
For several reasons, I decided to concentrate more of my days to scanning slides over prints. Roughly, I decided to scan slides about 5 of the 7 days in a week. Here’s why:
- I have more slides than prints to begin with — so gotta’ get through them!
- From my previous experience, I know I can usually scan prints much faster than slides, so I need more days to do a similar amount with slides.
- My Dad is anxiously waiting to see his entire slide collection “unearthed.” So, I don’t want to keep him waiting any longer than I have to! Prints have been easier through the years to pull out and look at, but digging out the slide projector and screen isn’t something that has been done in our family for the last 20-30 years I would say.
But, my suggestion to you, if you have more than one format, is to find a rhythm that works for you.
Maybe you would find a greater sense of accomplishment if you do all of one format first before moving on to the next. Or maybe if you have your entire collection sorted chronologically from the start, you might just want to move forward through it that way — prints or slides, whichever is chronologically next.
The best thing is to just figure out what works for you and stick with it so that every time you sit down to scan, you know what you are going to be working on. You don’t want to waste time each day trying to figure out your workflow. Your time is better spent scanning.
Alright. So now let’s get to the interesting part… the subtotals for the month!
In these charts, because this was my first month to report, I didn’t have any data from the prior month to compare it to. So, you’ll see I left those columns empty.
February Subtotals
Photos Scanned – February 2012 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Type | This Month | Last Month | Difference | |
Paper Prints Scanned | 38 | N/A | — | |
Slides Scanned | 542 | N/A | — | |
Totals | 580 | N/A | — |
Total Time Spent Scanning – February 2012 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Type | This Month | Last Month | Difference | |
Paper Prints | 1 hr 11 mins | N/A | — | |
Slides | 19 hrs 46 mins | N/A | — | |
Totals | 20 hrs 57 mins | N/A | — |
Average Time Spent Scanning – February 2012 | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Item | Avg. This Month | Avg. Last Month | Difference | ||
Time to Scan a Print | 1 min 52 sec | N/A | — | ||
Time to Scan a Slide | 2 min 11 sec | N/A | — | ||
Time Spent Daily | 1 hr 6 mins | N/A | — |
Photos Edited – February 2012 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Type | This Month | Last Month | Difference | |
Paper Prints | — | N/A | — | |
Slides | 5 | N/A | — | |
Totals | 5 | N/A | — |
My Thoughts After the First Month
My first thought was, “I absolutely can’t believe I’m actually doing it!”
After all of those years that I wanted to do this project but just kept putting it off, I can hardly believe I am finally accomplishing it.
I am completely thrilled!
And the best thing is, so far, I am not waking up in the mornings and thinking, “You know, I really don’t feel like scanning this morning.” No seriously.
The only times I have missed days have been either a much needed vacation with my wife or I just COULDN’T because I had to be away from the house for a large portion of the day. Sometimes, I just could’t make up the time that day.
If you really are so devoted that you feel bad about missing your scanning session, you can make deals with yourself that you will make up that session at another time when you could scan or edit, say… twice as much.
Editing Photos
You can see in that last chart above that I only edited (restored) 5 photographs. By editing I mean taking the time to straighten, crop, remove dust and scratches, and color correct each photo.
You may choose to have your scanning or editing software do a lot of this automatically to save you time. I’ve chosen to take the long route and do it all manually so I can maintain more control over the outcome. I not only want to preserve a raw (unedited) version but also a corrected one that meets my high expectations.
For me, editing isn’t as much of a priority at the moment as the scanning portion is. Really, they can be edited at any time in the future. The worry is that something will happen to the originals before they are scanned! (Think “fire”)
And the next most important thing I really want to do before process of editing them all is to have my family help me sort, label and caption them. They have more knowledge of who and what is in a lot of these photographs — many of which were taken before I was even born!
I know it may sound morbid, but time is passing and we only have access to our family while they are still alive. So, you gotta prioritize what’s most important to accomplish first in your collection.
The Importance of Cleaning Dust Off Slides
As I started to do a lot of slide scanning again, it quickly came back to me how important it is — if at all possible — to clean the dust off of old slides before you scan them. And man, old slides have a ton of it on there!
The problem is if you don’t brush it off, your digital images with be littered with these little black specks.
And it’s not just a speck here and a dot there. It’s like, if I may quote John Dunbar in one of my favorite movies “Dances with Wolves” when he tells his new friend Kicking Bird how many white men are coming:
“Like the stars.”
You can see on February 11th it took me an excruciatingly long 240 minutes to scan 62 slides. Ouch!
That day I was trying to come up with the best workflow to safely get this dust off of my slides before I scanned each one. See if you scan them with the dust, and later decide you aren’t happy with the dust on your digital images, then you have to resort to digitally editing them using “dust filters” or manually “painting” them out. It’s actually not that hard, it’s just more time consuming than most would prefer.
Additionally, if you choose to use “dust removal” settings (such as Digital ICE), they will be much more effective with less dust to decipher.
Tools I was trying out that day:
- Giottos Large Rocket Air Blaster
- Kinetronics Staticwisk Brush
- Kinetronics Scanner Cleaning Kit
- Dust-Off Compressed Gas
I actually found all of these tools to be extremely useful for their own purposes. But, if we’re talking about the single best tool to remove dust from slides, the one I now couldn’t work without would be the Kinetronics Staticwisk brush. That thing does wonders.
A lot of Time Required to Dust Dust?
I actually found myself getting into an excellent rhythm where it only takes me a few minutes longer total each day to brush and blow the dust off of each photo.
My scanner, the Epson V600, scans 4 slides at a time. At the beginning of my scanning session I take a few minutes to dust off 4 slides and then load them into the scanner.
Since it takes a little over a minute for the scanner to scan each of the 4 slides, I have a good solid 5 minutes or so free to be dusting off the next set of 4 slides before it’s their turn to be scanned.
So, you can see how you can be very effective with your dusting technique and not require much additional time if you are just efficient with the time you do spend.
My Scanning Progress for March
And now here’s my work for March. This was a full month, so I can really show you what you can accomplish if you just set your mind and attention to your photo collection.
My Scanning Progress — March 2012 | |||
---|---|---|---|
Date | Total Scanned | Type | Time Spent |
Mar 01 | 18 | Prints | 35 mins |
Mar 02 | — | — | — |
Mar 03 | — | — | — |
Mar 04 | — | — | — |
Mar 05 | 35 | Prints | 59 mins |
Mar 06 | 28 | Slides | 90 mins |
Mar 07 | 48 | Slides | 132 mins |
Mar 08 | 28 | Slides | 67 mins |
Mar 09 | 28 | Slides | 63 mins |
Mar 10 | 22 | Slides | 51 mins |
Mar 11 | 43 | Prints | 48 mins |
Mar 12 | — | — | — |
Mar 13 | 19 | Prints | 28 mins |
Mar 14 | 36 | Slides | 79 mins |
Mar 15 | 22 | Slides | 91 mins |
Mar 16 | 13 | Slides | 36 mins |
Mar 17 | 32 | Prints | 57 mins |
Mar 18 | 40 | Prints | 57 mins |
Mar 19 | 32 | Slides | 59 mins |
Mar 20 | 32 | Slides | 82 mins |
Mar 21 | 28 | Slides | 87 mins |
Mar 22 | — | — | — |
Mar 23 | 32 | Slides | 73 mins |
Mar 24 | 36 | Slides | 74 mins |
Mar 25 | 47 | Prints | 62 mins |
Mar 26 | 35 | Prints | 39 mins |
Mar 27 | 32 | Slides | 86 mins |
Mar 28 | 32 | Slides | 95 mins |
Mar 29 | 32 | Slides | 74 mins |
Mar 30 | 32 | Slides | 71 mins |
Mar 31 | 32 | Slides | 73 mins |
More Days Off — Doh!
I’m sure you may have noticed I missed some days in March too. Again, that’s okay. You just have to get used to the fact that life happens and you will just do you best to stay on the schedule you put forth for yourself.
In the case of those three days at the top, my wife and I took a much needed mini-vacation with close friends, and she wasn’t about to let me take my scanner and photos to the hotel room! At least, I don’t think she would have let me. Hmmm. 🙂
March Subtotals
Photos Scanned – March 2012 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Type | This Month | Last Month | Difference | |
Paper Prints Scanned | 269 | 38 | +231 | |
Slides Scanned | 545 | 542 | +3 | |
Totals | 814 | 580 | +234 |
Total Time Spent Scanning – March 2012 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Type | This Month | Last Month | Difference | |
Paper Prints | 6 hr 27 mins | 1 hr 11 mins | +5 hrs 16 mins | |
Slides | 23 hrs 03 mins | 19 hrs 46 mins | +3 hrs 17 mins | |
Totals | 29 hrs 30 mins | 20 hrs 57 mins | 8 hrs 33 mins |
Average Time Spent Scanning – March 2012 | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Item | Avg. This Month | Avg. Last Month | Difference | ||
Time to Scan a Print | 1 min 26 secs | 1 min 52 secs | -26 secs | ||
Time to Scan a Slide | 2 min 32 secs | 2 min 11 secs | +21 secs | ||
Time Spent Daily | 1 hr 8 mins | 1 hr 6 mins | +2 mins |
Photos Edited – March 2012 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Type | This Month | Last Month | Difference | |
Paper Prints | 1 | — | +1 | |
Slides | 6 | 5 | +1 | |
Totals | 7 | 5 | +2 |
My Thoughts After Month 2
Photos Scanned:
Wow — I scanned 814 photos in just one month! And that’s just from doing a little bit at a time.
This means if you have an averaged-sized family photo collection, which I understand is about 3,000 photos, if you followed my “morning schedule” routine you could be finished in just a little over 3 months. That’s not bad at all!
Average Scanning Times:
After almost a full month of non-stop scanning, I can see that I am in fact scanning prints quite a bit faster than slides as I had expected.
It’s taking me and my V600 on average 1 minute and 26 seconds to scan a print, but a full 2 minutes and 32 seconds to scan a slide.
I’m actually pretty happy with those numbers to be honest. With a modest-sized photo collection, you will be done faster than you think with times like that.
Milestones Accomplished
March happened to be a month of “1000” milestones for me.
Scanned Photo #1000!
On March 7th, I tattooed the number “01000” along the bottom of the slide which represented the 1000th photo that I was about to scan.
Wahooooooo!
When you have almost 10,000 photos ahead of you at the beginning, getting to the 1000th really felt like I was finally making some progress.
Scanned 1000th Slide!
Then, March 30th represented another huge day for me — well my Dad and I both.
I scanned photo #01675 that morning which happened to be the 1000th slide from our collection!
I was so happy, I memorialized the milestone with this extremely DORKY webcam snapshot!
(I really was still trying to wake up when I took that. That was way early! I’m more likely to do things like this then!)
Hey, at the time it seemed like good idea. I’m only posting it hoping it might continue to inspire you to work towards your own milestones — and then of course, do silly things like this!
Final End of Month Counts
So now, since we’re almost finished here, I want to present you with where my photo collection stands after finishing up 2 months of scanning.
The big numbers at the bottom rows of these 2 charts are what I now focus on. It’s like fuel for my inspiration seeing these numbers rise every day!
Total Scanning & Editing Counts as of March 31, 2012 | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Type | Current Scanned Count | Current Edited Count | Scanned Count Last Month | Edited Count Last Month | Total Collection | |
Paper Prints | 642 | 1 | 373 | 0 | 3508 | |
Slides | 1087 | 11 | 542 | 5 | 5810 | |
Totals | 1729 | 12 | 915 | 5 | 9318 |
OVERALL COMPLETED | |
---|---|
This Month | Last Month |
Scanning | Scanning |
18.56 % | 9.82 % |
Editing | Editing |
0.13 % | 0.05 % |
Entire Project | |
9.34 % | 4.94 % |
I LOVE IT! After only two months of scanning, plus some previous work I had done beforehand, I have scanned a total of 1729 photos!
And I see two other numbers that are really exciting to me as well. First is that at 18.56%. I am almost 20% finished scanning with all of the photos I have here at my house. Incredible!
And the second number is that 9.34% for the whole entire project. That means next month I will easily cross the 10% line.
If you look back at my first progress report at the end of January, just 2 months ago, I was only 1.80% complete with the entire project. So in just 60 days or so, I have come a long ways!
As you are scanning your own collection, crossing these “milestones” will be really important to you.
When you first decide that you really want to scan your collection, it’s so easy to keep telling yourself, “But I have so many photos — I will will never get it all done!”
But then you start, and before you know it, after doing a certain amount every day, or every weekend, or however you choose, you hit your first milestone and then everything changes.
The Fruits of Your Labor
Even though personal photos can rarely mean anything to someone outside of the family, I want to share with you the best part of scanning your photos — the reward — the “fruits of your labor!”
I can’t possibly share with you all of my photos I’ve recently worked on, nor would you want me to, but I would like to leave you with a few (unedited) photographs that I scanned in these past two months that have a lot of meaning to me, and just might — I hope — resonate in one way or another with you too.
Just wait, I bet you’ll find photos with similar importance to you, just like these! It’s so extremely rewarding. 🙂
Thanks for reading this — now, if you haven’t already, go make your photo collection a priority!
Cheers!
If it’s important to you, you will find a way.
If not, you’ll find an excuse.