Digital Decluttering: High-Speed Photo Scanning (Premium)

Earlier this week, I described my recently renewed effort to scan decades of paper-based photos. Thanks to a reader suggestion, this task is suddenly a lot less daunting.

Depending on your age, you may have some amount of paper-based photos sitting in albums or loose in boxes. Brad, for example, doesn’t own any paper-based photos, aside from his wedding album. But I’m almost 20 years older, and as I described in Digital Decluttering: Photos (Premium), I have an astonishing number of paper-based photos, loose and in albums, most of which date from 1983 through 1999 or 2000.

My goal is two-fold: To scan these photos, tag them correctly, and save them to at least two online services (OneDrive and Google Photos). And then to destroy the original albums and photos to save space and help us achieve a more minimalist existence that will make future downsizing easier.

That last bit will upset some. I’ve already explained my own reasons for doing what we’re doing, but your priorities—the things you value most, and so on—will vary. And that’s cool: If you like having photo albums on your shelves or otherwise enjoy photos this way, great. What I’m focusing on here is applicable to anyone who wishes to scan paper-based photos to a digital format. No matter what you intend to do with the originals.

There are a number of approaches, and what you use will depend on how many photos you need to scan and how much you can afford to spend. There are obviously online services that will scan photos or negatives that you send them. You can use smartphone apps. Or, if you have a ton of photos, as I do, you can scan them—in photo and/or negative form—yourself.

I used to have a bigger, bulkier scanner with a negative strip option, but for the past few years, I’ve been using a smallish Epson flatbed scanner to scan paper photos. Given the quality of most of those photos, this scanner is fine, and its 600 dpi scans are faithful to the originals. But scanning photos on a flatbed scanning is slow, monotonous, and requires a lot of handholding: I can only fit two 4 x 6 photos on the bed at a time for the software’s auto-crop functionality to work. If I put three photos on there, it scans them all together as a single large image.

This process is slow and steady, and I need to manually edit the metadata for each photo to account for at least the right date (or as close as possible); ideally, I’d be able to add location data as well. The scanner also does nothing to optimize the scans by removing red-eye, improving contrast, or any other automatic adjustment; it’s just a dumb scanner.

But you go to war with the army you have. And so I set off last weekend to dig into the mountain of boxes in my cellar that contain photos and start, anew, my efforts to get them digitized. This is work that happens for a while and trails off. And I knew that was exactly what would happen this year, despite my best intentions. The work, while valuable to me, is just too tedious to sustain.

And then a reader intervened. I should have perhaps predicted this: Reader comments to articles like this are often quite useful, and I don’t pretend that I have all the answers. Even when readers recommend things I’ve used before and rejected, for whatever reason, it’s helpful, and it affirms that I’m at least in the ballpark.

And what this reader, naterocks84, recommended, is a high-speed photo scanner. These devices work much like a money counter—which will be familiar if you ever worked in a bank like I did—in that you stack photos at the top and it scans them one-by-one. It’s supposed to be much faster than using a flatbed scanner, so it was immediately of interest. There was just one problem: It costs $600.

The reader who recommended the $600 high-speed photo scanner—which is an Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-Speed Photo and Document Scanning System—noted that he had the earlier model, the Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-Speed Photo Scanning System. The only major difference between the two, I believe, is that the newer system can scan to 1200 dpi, while the older one scans at a maximum of 600 dpi. You can save money by buying the older version, but only about $50: It costs $550 on Amazon right now. For that difference, I figured the newer one made more sense.

But $600. Ugh.

That was my initial reaction. But as I worked through it in my head, I started to realize that, even at $600, this device would save me a ton of time; as in months and months of time. Better still, it might turn this project—which I knew inside was literally an impossibility and something I would never complete—something I could actually finish. It was time for a talk with the wife.

She immediately agreed we should get one, which was a bit unexpected, as she’s more pragmatic than I am, and always has her eye on saving money. But she recommended looking for used and refurbished versions of the scanner on eBay, Craigslist, and elsewhere. She also said that we might see such an offer right on Amazon. We didn’t see one for the newer 680W. But we did for the FF-640: You can buy a certified refurbished version of this high-speed photo scanner for just $440. Could we have found a better deal? Perhaps. But we value Amazon’s no-questions-asked return policy, and it just seemed like the right way to go.

So I ordered one. It arrived yesterday.

And after less than a day of use, I can already tell that this high-speed photo scanner, while not perfect, will work much better than my previous system. And may, in fact, make this task of scanning all of our old photos surmountable.

Here’s what I’ve done so far.

In two and a half hours yesterday afternoon, I was able to scan over 950 photos—from a single photo album and 6 envelopes of loose photos—a rate that is both incredible and, as it turns out, probably not repeatable: These photos represented a best-case scenario for this scanner because they were all (mostly) flat and would fly through the scanner with a minimum of jamming. And the album was the type in which each photo goes into a protective sheath without any glue or sticky material. So, there was nothing to clog up the works, something that will be an issue with many of my coming albums to scan.

Still. 950 photos.

Also, this scanner can perform some useful meta-data and naming work on my behalf, automatically, which I really like. The naming convention system isn’t as ideal as I’d like—it lets you assign a month and year to each photo, but not the day of the month—but it’s workable. And the scanner applies date taken metadata, which is (nearly) ideal. (Because you can’t assign a day, the date taken field will always say “1” for the day (and “12:00” for the time.) Still, very useful.

The scanner will also optionally apply enhancements—auto enhance, red eye removal, and/or faded color restoration—to each photo as it scans. I wasn’t sure about this, but it lets you create two images for each scan, one enhanced and one original, so I configured it to do that. After 950 photo scans, I turned off the duplicate creation and will just go with its enhanced versions. They are almost always a lot better than the originals.

The scanner does jam a lot, and that can slow things down. Even on the nearly ideal photos I just scanned, I probably experienced 20 or more jams, and for most of them, it was unclear what the problem was. But jams are very easily and quickly cleared—the front of the device pops right open—and then you just get back to scanning. This represents some hand-holding, for sure. But it’s nowhere near as much work as using a flatbed scanner. I’m curious how bad this will get with the photos in the sticky albums. And suspect I’ll be cleaning the scanner regularly when I get to those.

The speed is excellent, and I had many jam-free sessions where one photo would move through the scanner every couple of seconds, error-free. You can put about 30 photos through the system at once, so I quickly moved to a workflow in which I had stacks of photos, ready for the scanner, in a row and just worked through them in turn.

The resulting photos (and the folders that organize them by event) still need a bit of work, but this part isn’t onerous. I rename each folder from the original form (like 1990_May_Our_wedding) to the system I prefer (in this example, 1990-05-26 Our wedding), but leave the scanner-generated photo names (1990_May_Our_wedding_0001 and so on because that doesn’t matter. Many photos need to be rotated, which is easily accomplished in File Explorer and can be done in bulk. If I have the exact date of a photo (or folder of photos), I add that to the date taken metadata. And … that’s about it.

I’ll still need to use the flatbed scanner for certain things: We have various documents and other non-standard photos that won’t work with the high-speed scanner. But I hope to do the bulk of this work using this new device. And so far, the Epson FastFoto FF-640 high-speed photo scanner is working out great. I’ll report back if that changes. Or if I ever actually finish this job, which would be amazing.