Author Topic: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?  (Read 2853 times)

primozaj

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Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« on: September 18, 2018, 02:51:31 PM »
So I been doing some internet searches and found a few sites that scan, clean up and store your old photos.  See, I have thousands of photos that my late wife took in the 90s and early 2000s before we met and later got married.  Its closing in on three years since she's been gone and I finally have to courage to get through the last room.  My mom is coming into town for something unrelated and she agreed to help me get rid of some stuff if I took a day off of work.  Initially, I was going to have her take out the photos and catalog them so we could send them off while I cleaned up other stuff.  I started to do the math and it was going to be astronomical... So I did a thing... probably a non-MMM thing...  I bought a brand new "Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-Speed Photo and Document Scanning System" on Amazon Prime for $599 plus tax.  I feel like I did my due diligence in checking it out but I still feel like a made a dumb purchase.  However, I feel like I'd be saving a bunch of money from the service and a bunch of time since they are self-fed.  I'll also help my mom out with some old photos she wants digitized.  I think what convinced me on this purchase was the fact that maybe I can resell on ebay later...

Anyway, does it seem like I made a mistake with this large purchase?

Oh and one other thing was that I was going to share all of these photos with her friends that are in the photos with her... I had a thought to give them away free but only ask that they donated some small amount per picture to a specific cause that my late wife was passionate about...  just an idea.

solon

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #1 on: September 18, 2018, 03:40:43 PM »
After you get the machine set up and figured out, you should figure out what you would charge to scan other people's photos!
I have a ton I could send you...

Lulee

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #2 on: September 18, 2018, 04:36:13 PM »
After you get the machine set up and figured out, you should figure out what you would charge to scan other people's photos!
I have a ton I could send you...

Same here, tons of photos of my own plus some I'd like to borrow from family members so I could have my own copy.

primozaj

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #3 on: September 19, 2018, 10:32:49 AM »
Hmmmm... maybe this will become a Mustachian Marketplace thread...

Capsu78

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #4 on: September 19, 2018, 04:15:31 PM »
Photo scanning is considered my hobby.  I have been around photography since my early teens and only went totally digital in 2007.  About the same time I started the slow and often tedious process of one at a time scanning/filing/maintaining backups and now have a library approaching 130,000 images.  I have a thousands more to go, and I am laughed at as a "digital hoarder"- until I retrieve something like a measles immunization from when my grown children were 6 in 10 minutes flat! 
Did you pay too much?  Not if the throughput, including labeling and putting into retrievable files is better than 2 per minute which is sort of what my flatbed scanner on a $60 HP printer does on average. 

"Best practices" include a a "save as" name that uses year/month in the name.  After tweeking my naming system, I settled on Year_Month description # in series.  So I saved 8 pictures earlier today from my daughters Facebook page of my grandsons 11 month birthday and labeled them "2018_9 Joey turns 11 months (1)", and put that into my "2018 Events" file folder.  Sometimes I have to guess the date and months, but over time I felt I was building a big puzzle and other photos helped me improve my dates.

I have file folders for every year since I god married, folders for "Pre- wife", "Pre Husband" for hers, "Pets through the years, Landscape/garden pictures, Easter, Halloween and Christmas seasons, Professional photos, and one called "On Holiday" where I have separated the photos of all the major trips I have made.   

ThatGuyFromCanada

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #5 on: September 21, 2018, 11:09:35 AM »
I'm curious to hear how the system works out for you, I'm also considering getting a fast photo scanner. My grandparents on both sides are gone now, and they had giant collections of old photos that I want to preserve.

primozaj

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #6 on: November 03, 2018, 12:14:14 PM »
So I scanned a bunch of the photos and the scanner works out pretty good.  My wife loved photos so after scanning about 1500 I realized that a lot were already in digital to begin with (whoops!!) and she had sent them to Snapfish to get printed since she loved photo albums.  In the midst of all of this I stumbled on to WAY more photos that I thought she had, so this is turning into a good investment.

The scanner itself is pretty nice and will scan in jpg and tiff at different dpi levels.  It also does dual sided so if she wrote something on the back it gets scanned too.  If you give the software a subject title it sets up the folder and names the photos so that's pretty nice.  I have a few more boxes and then my mom's photos but after that I'd probably be willing to give this a go for others.  I'd just have to think about costs but I think I could do it inexpensively since I am not doing any image enhancing.  Once I figure that out, I'll post something in the marketplace thread and then put a link here.
« Last Edit: November 03, 2018, 12:15:46 PM by primozaj »

LSUFanTX

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #7 on: November 03, 2018, 04:18:11 PM »
I had the same internal struggle about a year ago and ultimately bought this same scanner. I found one at an OfficeMax that was being closed, so I was able to get it at 30% off. What ultimately got me off the fence was looking on eBay and seeing that I could resell it used and recoup about 75% of my cost.

For anyone else, be careful sending off photos for scanning. I sent a bunch to an outfit several years ago because they had decent reviews and good prices, but the company was overextended, had way more orders than they could process with their staff and equipment, and ended up going bankrupt before my stuff was ever scanned. They sold their assets to a competitor who thankfully shipped everyone their pictures back, but for well over a year my stuff was in limbo and I could have lost those pictures forever.

Capsu78

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #8 on: November 03, 2018, 04:19:08 PM »
Thanks for the update.  How easy is it to rename files and put into folders?

LSUFanTX

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #9 on: November 03, 2018, 11:00:12 PM »
Thanks for the update.  How easy is it to rename files and put into folders?

Pretty easy. I just drag and drop files via Windows Explorer from the default scan folder I specified in installation. The only tricky part is making sure you move the scan of the back of the print with the front, and that if you rename one you rename the other.

I was able to scan several hundred photos I inherited from my grandmother in an evening, as well as some of my own from the pre-digital era. The MIL has borrowed it to scan all her family photos, and we will probably use it over the holidays to scan my mother's collection. The only negative I have found thus far is that it cannot handle thicker prints like Polaroids.

Mgmny

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #10 on: November 04, 2018, 06:19:15 AM »
Why is this better/worse than the document/photo scan feature that Google Photos has natively?

https://www.google.com/photos/scan/


SnackDog

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #11 on: November 04, 2018, 06:54:17 AM »
I find that most old photos are garbage in the sense that I look at them and have little interest in them now, even the ones 20-30 years old.  Go through them and throw away 80-90% of them. Keep the 10% that are truly fabulous and make your eyes light up. Scan those and resell the scanner.

MrSal

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #12 on: November 04, 2018, 08:10:39 AM »
Why is this better/worse than the document/photo scan feature that Google Photos has natively?

https://www.google.com/photos/scan/

Speed? Can you imagine going through hundreds/thousands of pictures individually?

Quality? No matter how good your phone camera is, it's not as good as a dedicated photo scanner.

primozaj

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Re: Photo Scanning - Good Idea?
« Reply #13 on: November 11, 2018, 07:42:46 AM »
I am going through 1000s (I've already scanned upwards of 5k) and I can't imagine using anything other than this type of scanner.