Scan'o'rama!

My husband thinks I'm crazy. I know this because he has told me so: at least 10 times in the last 6 months.

Furthermore, I'm reasonably certain that 3/4 of his immediate family agree.

What could cause this marital tension? Only my latest project, to scan and digitize all of both our families' photos, negatives, slides, and documents - trivial and not.

Just as a sample, when I decided to undertake this project I counted them. (Well, some of them.) On my husband's father's side alone, I have a box containing 1192 pictures and 1853 negatives (of which 1362 are 35mm negatives, and the other 491 are 100 negatives). That doesn't count the dozens of handwritten recipes in his grandmother's recipe box, or the documents of ancestors coming through Ellis Island in 1902. Yes, that accounts for 1/4 of our combined heritage on media.

I know what you're thinking, because I've heard it a lot lately. She must be crazy!

But let me at least explain: a few months ago I attended a family get together where we looked at slides of my mother's side of the family. Slide after slide of irreplaceable memories, stacked up in round donuts. I can't remember ever having seen these particular slides beforehand, which isn't surprising: the family has a *lot* of them: likely my uncle grabs 2-3 never-before-seen rounds once every 2 years for family get-togethers. Strikingly, many of these slides had photos of my great and great great grandparents. I thought: Woah.

Unfortunately, in some of the slides my aging grandmother was the only individual who could identify every person in the photos. Yes, that aging grandmother. The only one remaining out of 5 in that generation, in my state, that would be able to recognize the photos, that is still alive today. We lost 3 of them two years ago all in a summer, as though each of the deceased came back for their siblings until they were reunited again. (To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised!)

Where others saw a marginally interesting slideshow of our family through the years, I saw a tragedy waiting to happen.

Then there is the box of photos from my father in law. Literally thousands of images sitting in my own back closet where they’d been neglected for the past five years. Included in this smorgasbord are some striking photos of family members long passed on that I never met, but see every day in my husband or his siblings. He has his grandmother’s teeth. His sister has her hair. His father, at times, holds himself with the same pride I can see in his uncle in 1962 – with that same determined, forward-looking, American look on his face, though it steps out of another time, in black and white photos where children wore 3-piece suits to church. His uncle was an immigrant from Cuba. Will I see these same features in my children?

I would be happy to share these photos with my family: it’s just not feasible to go down to the photo store and have them make a quintuple set of every negative on file for everybody in the extended family.

While considering these things, it did occur to me then: in this age of global digital media, there’s got to be a way to put these all into digital format, so everybody in our family can enjoy them. And then perhaps we could even catalog them by dates and names: and each picture could be tagged with Grandma’s help. If nothing else, it would make for a fascinating history project and a great Christmas gift to everybody in my family. (Okay, maybe just a great Christmas gift to me, but I can pretend!)

Over the past year as I've considered these things, I've started a little of this project. As I continue, I hope to share more of it. Here's a little of what I've learned so far: Sending your slides, negatives, and photos to be digitized by a professional company can be expensive. In addition, you can't know if they will maintain any kind of organization to your media, even if you send it organized to them. And you have no control over what size or shape or quality of scan you get, or whether the raw scan is edited at the outset (some would prefer this done professionally, others, like me, prefer hands-on modification). That being said, if sending it out is what you'd prefer, you can't beat the prices at Scancafe - though you'll have to mail off your media to them. Local dedicated photographic media stores like Inkley's will also do it for a price: they mail it off to their own labs, though.

I decided, for the sake of control and also because I am insane, to buy my own scanners and do the work myself. The price overall will probably be lower, save for the massive amount of time being put in. Lots of internet research told me that if I have the choice between scanning slides and negatives or their color photo counterparts, I should choose to scan slides and negatives (they are much much higher quality 'originals' whereas a photo is a lower quality copy). And furthermore, if I'm going to be scanning a lot of slides and negatives, I need to use a dedicated film/slide scanner, preferably with Digital ICE. This means one that doesn't do prints at all - no flatbed. But I also do have a number of prints I'd like to scan, so that meant buying two scanners.

After reviewing a number of scanners in my price range (both needed to add up to less than $1000 on my budget), I narrowed my list down to 11. From those, I chose one flatbed: an Epson Perfection V500 ($250), and one dedicated film scanner: A Nikon Coolscan V ED ($550). These fit my needs for resolution, Dmax, bit color, price, and reviewed very well on professional sites. Furthermore, they could be purchased at a retail outlet, so if they didn't work I could return them: but they've worked great so far. In the interim, however, Nikon has stopped producing the Coolscan V ED, leaving anybody interested in doing this kind of work in a lurch. (Its best competitor is the Minolta DiMage Scan Elite 5400 II, which I would have preferred: but Minolta stopped producing this scanner before I started looking, and thus it was not available at any retail outlets). If you're looking to do this kind of thing yourself, you might look for one of the above two scanners on ebay - they sell for more now then they did retail!

Both scanners came with their own proprietary scanning software, which is fairly straightforward and easy to use. However, I was interested in using the same software for both applications, both for ease of use and because I wanted some advanced scanning options. Amateurs and professionals have two options in this area: Vuescan and Silverfast. The former is cheaper, but the support is also pretty minimal and though it's pretty intuitive, the lack of any real help options is a hindrance. The latter is much more expensive, and according to most review sites they are both comparable. I went with Vuescan.

I could have saved the $40 Vuescan cost had I realized that it doesn't support the scanner settings that I really need: the flatbed Epson will scan multiple photos at once if you can fit them all on the scanning area, whereas Vuescan will only do one at a time. As the Vuescan method takes 5x longer and the overall quality is pretty comparable, I've ended up using the Epson proprietary software anyhow. For anybody else out there wondering, I would say if you have a flatbed don't bother with Vuescan. It's updated regularly but when I queried the owner, he said they had no plans in the near future to add the feature to the software.

For the slide and film scanning, I've used Vuescan mostly because it's a little more intuitive than the Nikon software, but at that point I already owned it so it didn't really matter which I used.

After playing around with settings for months looking for a universal scan setting which would minimize any post-scanning editing necessary, I've decided there is no such thing. I don't have the scanners do any color or lighting editing whatsoever, as it can remove information from the scan and I can process it fairly quickly post-scan if necessary. Luckily, most of the photos I've been scanning are in very good condition. Hurray!

On a good day scanning full time, I can get ~ 50-80 slides or photos scanned while I putter around the house in between scan setups. That's not a lot overall, but it's a fast enough rate for me to keep an eye on details from individual scans and make adjustments for them as necessary. The result has been very rewarding: a dual layer DVD for Craig's family for Christmas, and dozens of slide scans I was able to show off to my grandmother a few weeks ago.

My current collection of scanned photos and slides is small, but growing. I've definitely got more to write about: lots of little details about the hows and whats of scanning and editing photos. But for the moment, enjoy the leaked photos above. In the meantime, I'll give bonus points to anybody in our family who can identify the people and settings of each of the above pictures, all culled from my 500+ scan database so far. =)