Scanner for bulk conversion of photos

fret_wimp2

My parents have boxes and boxes...and boxes of photos of our family as we grew up.
I want to convert them to digital so they are backed up, but its a very laborious task with a flatbed scanner.

Does anyone have any recommendations of a scanner that can take a stack of photos &/or negatives to digitise them in bulk?

One thing, im not comfortable with sending them off to one of these scanning services so it has to be a device i cna buy and do this myself.

stcstc

i have a kodak picture scanning system for doing bulk scans

very quick, not as good quality as a good flatbed, but good enough.

cost is around 1500 euros

Echoes675

i did the same thing a while ago, i was making a printed photo book for a family member. what i did was mount a camera on a tripod and blutack the photos to the wall. the camera won't move so you won't need to re focus (I used a remote for the shutter).

fret_wimp2

eoin_mcg wrote: »

i did the same thing a while ago, i was making a printed photo book for a family member. what i did was mount a camera on a tripod and blutack the photos to the wall. the camera won't move so you won't need to re focus (I used a remote for the shutter).

If i understand you correctly, you photographed each of your photographs?
Unless its ideal conditions (like when a photo is enclosed in a scanner) i cant see this being a great method, and even less so when the collection size is considered (2k+ photos)

Alltherage

In fairness loading 2k photos into a scanner and putting each of them under a lens is probably about equal in terms of rsi, getting lighting right is going be entertaining especially if the print has a curve in it.

Calahonda52

fret_wimp2 wrote: »

My parents have boxes and boxes...and boxes of photos of our family as we grew up.
I want to convert them to digital so they are backed up, but its a very laborious task with a flatbed scanner.

Does anyone have any recommendations of a scanner that can take a stack of photos &/or negatives to digitise them in bulk?

One thing, im not comfortable with sending them off to one of these scanning services so it has to be a device i cna buy and do this myself.

There is a place in Swords where you can bring them and they will do them there and then, for that volume you should break them down into smaller numbers and call them first

Echoes675

fret_wimp2 wrote: »

If i understand you correctly, you photographed each of your photographs?
Unless its ideal conditions (like when a photo is enclosed in a scanner) i cant see this being a great method, and even less so when the collection size is considered (2k+ photos)

Yep that's exactly what I did. Getting the right light was important but as my purpose was for the creation of a photo album rather than simply archival, I spent a few minutes in photoshop making corrections and I ended up with 16 megapixel images.

Still much faster than the use of a scanner imo.

The Black Oil

I did this a few years ago for my sister's 21st and for a 50th. IMO, it's something to think of as a long term project if you're doing it in dribs and drabs. I'd like to have them all on an external HD and then the cloud, but even then I'd worry about back ups of back ups.

For the 50th photos, they were old beermat shape ones from many decades ago. I put 4 on a sheet of A4 or black card with blu tac, scanned this in, cropped whatever I needed to and split up the pics from there. Then I'd play around a little as some had sellotape stains or were quite faded. They were appreciated and it's a fun thing to do, but it can be very labour intensive. For 6 x 4, you'd get 2 to a page, iirc.