software for storing lots of old photos

[blue*archie]

Hi,

My mother-in-law recently passed away & while we were cleaning out her house we found boxes full of old pictures. I also have many many pictures I have taken over the years just lying around. I'm trying to come into the 21st century now & scan these into my computer. With the amount that I want to scan I'm not sure where to start.

What kind of hard drive should I buy to store them on or backup? What kind of software would be good to organize that many photos. What should I do with all the actual photos? I literally have boxes of them, some are really old. Any help you can offer will be very much appreciated.

Thanks

[random one]

first of all, there are 2 ways you can scan the pictures:

if you only have the actual pictures then you can only use a straight-up scanner.

but if you have the negatives then you have the option to buy a slide/negative scanner for about $75 (maybe cheaper) that will scan the negatives into 5 or 6 megapixel images.

as far as i know, you can only scan pics one at a time. the slide/negative scanners i have seen allow you to load 4 picture strips of the negative into them (maybe an entire strip if the negatives haven't been cut). but however you do it, it's gonna be a time consuming process.


whatever way you choose, you can just buy an external hard-drive (maybe around $100 for anywhere from 150gb to 1tb, depending on the brand). i picked up a cheap 640gb external hard-drive for $90 cdn.

if you really want to play it safe you can buy 2 hard-drives and copy the pics onto both of them, so if one crashes you won't lose everything. and if you're OK with only having digital copies of the pics, you can do whatever you want with the actual pictures. i don't know if pictures are recycleable, due to the use of chemicals in the processing. someone else could probably give you an answer. but if you're gonna toss the pics, i would have them saved on 2 separate hard-drives, incase one fries.

as far as software for organizing them, i can't comment. i don't use software for that, i just name folders manually and group them how i want to.

[freygr]

Hi,

My mother-in-law recently passed away & while we were cleaning out her house we found boxes full of old pictures. I also have many many pictures I have taken over the years just lying around. I'm trying to come into the 21st century now & scan these into my computer. With the amount that I want to scan I'm not sure where to start.

What kind of hard drive should I buy to store them on or backup? What kind of software would be good to organize that many photos. What should I do with all the actual photos? I literally have boxes of them, some are really old. Any help you can offer will be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Well you need to look at the photos, and decide how sharp the photos are as most old snap shots scanning at 300 dpi in JPG is just fine (B&W). You need to look at the programs available as image viewing, there are some that are free. But I use Thumbs Plus about $80 USD and I'm very happy with it.

Note you need to look at the photo paper surface as the textured paper finish is hard to scan.

[KmH]

The software to have for managing an image database is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

[Franglais]

Scanning pictures is a tedious process. Don't rush at it.You have years to complete the task so you can afford to only do it when you feel like it.

In order for your collection to be managable you have to decide how to organise it. I have used the following standard:

1. Each image is stored as a JPG
2. Each image has a unique name which enables me to find the original source. Mostly I'm scanning from film and my films are all numbered sequentially with the images numbered from 1-36, so you get an image called 3460-20. (I still use this system with digital, but the number of images on a "film = memory card" varies from 1 to 1200)
3. The JPG's are stored in folders by Theme with subfolders. My Themes are Events, Family, People, Travels, Models, Semi-pro, etc. Last weekend I created Events\2009\Bievres Photo Fair and dumped all the photos I did at the fair in there
4. Every single JPG has the date on which the image was taken written into the EXIF part of the JPG. The scanner won't do this. I use ACDSee to do a mass update of all the files in a folder

I use ACDSee to do my image management. It gives me a thumbnail view of the folder contents, the search possibilities are quite good and most importantly it gives me a Calendar view of the images. I can click on a date and see all the images taken on that day