I am about to start a scanning project consisting of approximately 4000 family slides & negs (all are 35mm and all are color). I will be using a Minolta Scan Dual III, scanning at 2820 dpi and I plan to save the images in TIF format. I want to catalog these files in an easily retrievable maner and to that end, I’ve been considering using Portfolio or ThumbsPlus.
Any suggestions/recommendations regarding my scanning and cataloging plans would be most appreciated. If additional information is needed in order to best advise me, fire away…
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I set up an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the images. Really, you can do this project in any number of ways….
By the way, surely not all of the images are significant enough to justify the greatly increased size of a tiff file…
I formerly stored most of them in jpg format. For the future, I expect to save them in the NEF format (they are lots smaller than tiff files).
Be certain to use only the very best CD-R or DVD disks. The others may not be readable in a couple of years or so.
Jim wrote in message
I am about to start a scanning project consisting of approximately 4000
family slides & negs (all are 35mm and all are color). I will be using a Minolta Scan Dual III, scanning at 2820 dpi and I plan to save the images in TIF format. I want to catalog these files in an easily retrievable maner and to that end, I’ve been considering using Portfolio or ThumbsPlus.
Any suggestions/recommendations regarding my scanning and cataloging plans
would be most appreciated. If additional information is needed in order to best advise me, fire away…
I’m far from an expert on such matters, but here are my thoughts:
First of all, while TIF preserves the utmost image-quality, you will need a lot of storage! If I’m not mistaken, each of your scans will result in a 35MB file (give or take) and therefore, your 4000 family shots will consume approximately 140GB. Nowadays, you can get a 160GB-200GB hard drive for under $200, but I just thought you should be aware of this.
Regarding cataloging software, I use and would highly recommend Extensis Portfolio 6. It’s difficult to think of an organizing/cataloging function that is not provided by Portfolio. One of its features that’s sure to facilitate your project, is its Instant Cataloging which greatly expedites bringing items into Portfolio, naming, adding keywords, etc. I also have come to appreciate its FolderSync feature which ensures that its catalog indexing doesn’t get messed up when you copy, move, delete, or rename files on your hard drive (I’ve never had a problem finding anything)! I’ve never used Thumbs+, or PS Album for that matter, but I don’t think that they come close to matching Portfolio’s features (as they say, "you get what you pay for").
I have been through some family archiving projects and my suggestion is to review the quality of the images as you go along and consider that a lot of family photos are just plain bad. Out of focus, backs of heads, unknown subjects, blown out faces etc. Unless you are related to a group of exceptional photograpers, you probably have a lot less than 4000 images that anyone could care about. In my extended family, the ratio is about 3 good images to 40 unusable duds. In summary, consider just picking the best of the bunch, do your best to restore and save those images.
Whatever you do DON’T get rid of your originals. I’ve heard of people who have scanned their originals and then thrown them out. Digital at 2820 DPI still won’t beat the original.
Photobug: Thanks very much for your constructive comments. I do plan to print the best of the shots (perhaps 10% or so). So I think I’ll save them as TIFF LZW (compressed) which should give me just about the same quality as TIFF while saving me quite a bit of space. Thanks also the Portfolio recommendation. Based on your positive remarks, I will check it out.
Gary: On the surface, weeding out the bad shots (in order to reduce the number of scans) seems like a good idea, but the large majority are negs which makes doing that quite difficult.
Greg: Tossing the film never entered my mind…
Anyone else have any suggestions before I go for it?
4000 slides or negatives sounds like a year long project. I’ve seen a few people get into scanning by getting involved in a similar family project.
I see three issues. The time frame of the project. naming the files so everything can be found later, and the amount of space and back up necessary.
I checked the reviews and your scanner is much faster using a USB2 port. If your computer doesn’t have one, purchase a USB2 adapter card. But my initial feeling is to sell your scanner and pick up a Nikon Coolscan because it has Digital Ice (less time post processing) and a bulk transparency feeder. That’s what I would do if I couldn’t find someone else to create the raw scans inexpensively for me. And the Coolscan 5000 is faster than previous models. So is it worth upgrading a $300 scanner to an $1100+ scanner? Depends on what your time is worth. I wouldn’t hesitate.
I also recommend using ACDSee as a thumbnail viewing program. Portfolio has more depth but is much more complicated. IrfanView is free and you can include it on CD’s you give the family members so they can view the images.
Workflow. I’d scan half days and work on the files the other half day. Then burn two copies of each master on a daily basis to back up off the computer. Use write once CD’s, not rewriteable CD’s. They are more stable. Put one set in a safety deposit box.
PSR: Gary’s suggestion makes good sense for your slides, but I don’t know of an easy way to preview negatives before scanning. Since most of your film are negs, one thought that comes to mind is to scan them in at low res just for the purpose of viewing them so that you can separate the ‘wheat from the chaff’.
I also agree with Larry’s ideas, except for ACDSee, which was unstable when I tried it.
Hmm, well I guess anyone is entitled to their opinion, but publishing it on a website doesn’t give it more credibility.
I presume PSR is an amateur photographer (like me). Most of us amateurs do what we do because of satisfaction and enjoyment. If we were to measure the value of our time in doing it, we wouldn’t be ‘wasting our time’ doing photo-editing or printing. We would just bring our film (or flash-cards) to Costco and be done with it.
In his article, Ken suggests sending one’s slides or negs to Chrome for scanning at $.65 each. He doesn’t tell you that will only get you lower-quality JPEG files… Right! – good luck when PSR (or his family) wants enlarged prints of some those shots! Oh sure, Chrome will be happy to supply TIFFs or PNGs, but the price escalates exponentially.
Ken’s ‘what’s your time worth?’ argument is based on the project likely taking longer than a year to complete… I say so what; PSR’s family pictures were probably taken over a few decades! So I encourage PSR to pursue the project, but I would organize it into meaningful and workable tasks. That way, it doesn’t matter how long it takes for the entire project to be completed, as each smaller segment can be completed in a reasonable time-frame and those results can be enjoyed and shared with family in a timely manner.
I say go for it – just break it up into ‘digestible chunks’. 😉
photobug~ thanks a lot for the time you took in providing answers and for your sensible guidance. I’m pretty sure I can break my large project down into several sub-projects, each consisting of only a few hundred items and as simple as that approach is, it never occured to me! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Glad I was of help. One more thing to keep in mind… Dust is a big problem which most of the time you don’t notice until after scanning. So I highly recommend getting and using a good 1" camel-hair brush (a StaticMaster brush is even better) and a can of compressed air. 😉
PS Rookie: As a final thought, take very good care of your slides and negs because at this point in time, I’ve had bad experience with optical storage (CD-R) – as I described in ‘Another Major Scanning Project’
photobug "Another major scanning project" 5/3/04 8:38am </cgi-bin/webx?13/8>
As of now I am archiving my files onto a removable hard-drive, but they have been known to crash… 🙁
Thanks again photobug for all your help and tips. Your last comment about CD data longevity is very discouraging, but I’m glad I found out now before relying on it (I wonder if DVD is any better in that regard?).
Learn how to rescue details, remove flyaways, add volume, and enhance the definition of hair in any photo. We break down every tool and technique in Photoshop to get picture-perfect hair, every time.
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