Digitizing old family photos -- flatbed or auto-feed/top-load scanner?
Digitizing old family photos -- flatbed or auto-feed/top-load scanner?
I want to digitize all of our family photos and I have boxes and boxes of old photos from the 1940s (parents' baby/early childhood photos) through today. Many of the photos are those square 3x3 prints from the mid '60s (parents' newlywed days) and '70s. Later photos are mostly 4x6 prints. Hundreds , maybe even thousands of them.
I've been reading up on photo scanners and am having trouble deciding on which one to get/use. The two that keep coming up on the good reviews lists are the Epson FastFoto (about $500) auto-feed model or the Epson v600 flatbed (about $330).
I have so many photos that I imagine it would take forever to scan them on a flatbed, but my concern about the FastFoto model is that the roller mechanism inside the machine might scratch or otherwise damage the photos. I've read many reviews on this model and about half of the users said they had no issues while the others said the roller mechanism left lines or scratches on their old photos.
Would it be possible to scan batches of photos on a flatbed to save time or would it end up taking just as long as doing them one by one? I just don't know which model to get.
flatbed is best in my opinion, feeder is good for a few old photos, etc,..but cataloging many of them, and they possibly might be bent, etc flatbed is best
I very strongly recommend an auto-feed scanner! I have tried flatbeds, negative scanners and commercial services. Then I found a used Epson FastFoto FF-680W auto-feed scanner, and honestly, I would never go back! The quality is excellent and they are unbelievably fast! You will save SO much time!
If you’re scanning family-type photos the source quality is never perfect anyway. Much MUCH better to free up time for organizing, labeling, tagging etc all the photos — and to have time to actually watch them with family and friends.
Not once has a photo been damaged for me. But even if that would happen to 1% of the thousands of photos: so what? Better that you get them digitized in a reasonable amount of time, than that you treat them like unique collector’s items. In my experience, if you dont scan the, now, the likeleyhood of them beimg just lost or thrown away in the future is very high.
Not to hi-jack but in the middle of scanning my in-laws wedding book, celebrating their 50th anniversary. Any suggestions for colourization? Been using Photoshops Nueral Filters and it's okay. Scanned in on Epson V600 with the highest detail I can so should have "some" pixels to play around with.
I have had some success with palette.fm - the free version gives you a small size photo output. I have never tried the paid version, but worth a try.
I guess I can speak for this project since I have scanned in the last 11 months over 20K photos and negatives from my family dating back to 1906.
I chose the Epson v600 (I also use a v300 I also have) mostly because of the negative adapter that can scan up to ten 35mm negatives in one go. Also, my project was mostly 6x6 negatives and 35mm and only a small portion were prints (most photos were B&W and most 35mm were color).
One HUGE thing I missed in the first month or so was not taking advantage of the free SilverFast app that you can get the serial number directly from the publisher. Do not underestimate the quality of that app: as much as I hated it in the beginning (not intuitive, doesn't "look" like a Mac app, etc.) but it is a very powerful app that will save you a tone of time "cleaning up" your photos. Lear how to use at least the basic functions of the app and you will save yourself a lot of time on Photoshop later.
I still have 3 more trips' worth of photos I need to bring from my parents' home overseas, but despite their initial reluctancy in having any interest over me placing those scanned photos on a Synology, they find themselves spending a lot of their time looking at photos that for the last many years have been in albums they seldom look. Now, they are just a couple of clicks or taps away from any of the photos.
Also make sure you catalog your photos while you scan them them, much easier to find what you're looking for. I use the old method of naming as "YYYY_MM_DD Description of the photo or event". Most of the photos were entire films or series of films from specific trips so my Photo albums also follow the same naming convention, making it simple to sort or find by date. Hope this helps and let me know if I can be of any assistance. It's been an amazing project now toping my collection over 110K photos (not counting the last 10 years or so of phone and digital photos).
"not intuitive" is putting it lightly. It's great at what it does, but good lord does it have the absolute worst UI of any piece of software I've used in the last 40 years ago using computers.
A few years ago I scanned in a lot of family photos. I did it over a few months. I used a Canon flat bed that also has a negative adapter and slide adapter. I organized the files in multiple folders that were in a folder named the year (I estimated some). I scanned them at the highest resolution. Some where from the late 1800s. Keep the originals, my aunt and uncle threw some of their originals away! I asked if their hard disk dies what will they do? 🤦
I scanned so I could get rid of the originals and save space. Just keep backups, one extra external and an offsite copy.
You could lose the originals and the hard drive in a small fire or flood too.
Only reason I would keep an original if its an important photo or if I thought the scan is not good enough and could be improved.
I have both of those scanners and I consider them precision tools for different jobs. This year, I've scanned 10,000+ photos including print, slides, and negatives.
If you're dealing with small format print photos, go with the FastFoto. Not only will it save you hundreds of hours, it has a wide variety of tools and settings you can tweak to get great results. Scanning using the flatbed will take you about 30 seconds to 1 minute per photo depending on how much you can pre-prepare with an assembly line setup. The Fastphoto can do 50 photos in that same amount of time depending on your settings.
I did not have any issues with damaging photos. I actually had photos damage the machine, if there was glue or an errant staple in the pile. But I managed to clean it off and repair it without issue.
Auto feed.
I did this using an HP multifunction laser printer and it took forever. You can get apps that scan the whole area so you can do multiple photos at one time, still took forever.
Bit the bullet and bought a Fujitsu Scan Snap ix1600. It was expensive and soooooooo worth it. Pop a stack of photos in, hit the button, repeat. I banged out hundreds and hundreds of old photos that had been sitting around for years in a couple of weekends.
Now I am digitizing all my books with the same device.
If I had to do it all over again I might get the Brother version, but other than that? Auto feed all the way.