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 ...

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