
Ask HN: How to scan and archive slides and photos? - schu
I have a few thousand slides and photos that I would like to scan and archive myself. Currently I&#x27;m considering a scanner in the Epson Perfection V550 Photo range and writing a small program to store and tag the image blobs.<p>I wonder what others use and what works well, both for hardware and software? Any recommendations, dos and don&#x27;ts, etc. that you can share? Thanks :)
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mceachen
1) scan at a reasonable resolution. Don't scan less than 4k resolution
(3840x2160), and not more than 200-300 dpi for the largest print you'd want to
make (really, an 8x10 print will look fine at 150dpi, which is only 1200x1500,
but you may want to be able to crop after the scan, so more pixels would allow
that). Know that there won't be enough latent image content in the slide to
warrant > 20MP, even if it's on high quality 35mm velvia slides.

2) pick out a handful of different "exemplar" slides from your collection (a
portrait, a group shot, a landscape, ...), and for each, try out the built-in
auto exposure, auto image quality enhancers, and auto dust removal features.
Some work great, some turn your scan into a posterized mess, and some will
only work well for certain shots.

3) put your slides into yyyy-mm-dd directories, or name the image something
like `yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss.jpg`. Some software (like PhotoStructure) will infer
the captured-at time based on the date encoded in the file name or parent
directory of it's missing from the exif metadata. You may want to pre-sort the
slides by date to make this easier.

4) if you're going to edit all of them after scanning, use TIFF. If you
aren't, use JPEG at a high quality setting (like 95%).

5) clean the slides beforehand if you can (research how to do this safely).
It's a lot easier to make a nice scan if the source was cleaner to begin with.

6) see if you're scanner supports batch or gang scans. If you've got 3200
slides and you can do them in batches of 8 or 16, that's a lot less fiddling
than doing every one, one after another.

7) take your time. You'll burn out of you do too many in one sitting, and not
finish.

