My mom passed and I was give her photographs to scan for my sibs.
I have a slide scannner I bought years ago but never used. I’m still waiting for a boring winter day when scanning slides is more attractive than cleaning the cat box. I digress.
The solution I’ve found is a Canon imageFORMULA RS40 Photo and Document Scanner. I thought it was going to be nice to scan pictures with the auto feeder. This thing is so much more than that. First of all, it will take anything from a wallet to an 8×10. And you can feed it different sized photos at the same time.
If you can stack them up, it will scan them. The biggest challenge was configuring it for black and white or color and then where to put the output files. Once this is done you basically have a button that you press for the type of photos you’re going to scan. The process goes like this.
Drop in a stack of pictures and scan them.
I’m scanning front and back at the same time to pick up on any info on the back of pictures (mostly dates and people’s names) and I end up with two images. Here’s where the cool stuff happens. When scanning completes, you are presented with a batch of images for review. Almost no images are cockeyed. The scanner straightens them although you may have to rotate them to be right side up.
You rarely have to crop anything to the size of the paper because the scanner uses magic to size the image to the size of the paper of that specific photo. Using simple point and click tools, you can rotate, crop, straighten, and minor color adjustments. So far, I found these simple tools were enough. While reviewing I select all the blank backs of photos and delete them.
When finished with the batch, you then save them.
At around 1000 photos the machine started feeding slowly or failing to feed. I just wiped the rollers down with rubbing alcohol. Works like new again.
It’s easier to scan loose photos because you don’t have to pull them out of albums. I did over 200 photos of various sizes in a stack in about one hour even though all the images had a curl to them.
By the grace of God, years ago my mom pulled all her photos out of the old paper albums and put them into 3 ring binders with plastic sleeves. I’m now doing my mom’s photo albums which require me to pull them from the plastic sleeve, scan, then return them to the plastic sleeves. There are 10 images per page and it takes 5-minutes to do a page. I did 600 images in a full day of scanning.
My own photos are still in the Fotomat envelopes (showing my age) so I should be able to scan them in bunches. Now if you happen to find a slide scanner with similar automation, please let me know.