Digitizing old family photos -- flatbed or auto-feed/top-load scanner?
Digitizing old family photos -- flatbed or auto-feed/top-load scanner?
I want to digitize all of our family photos and I have boxes and boxes of old photos from the 1940s (parents' baby/early childhood photos) through today. Many of the photos are those square 3x3 prints from the mid '60s (parents' newlywed days) and '70s. Later photos are mostly 4x6 prints. Hundreds , maybe even thousands of them.
I've been reading up on photo scanners and am having trouble deciding on which one to get/use. The two that keep coming up on the good reviews lists are the Epson FastFoto (about $500) auto-feed model or the Epson v600 flatbed (about $330).
I have so many photos that I imagine it would take forever to scan them on a flatbed, but my concern about the FastFoto model is that the roller mechanism inside the machine might scratch or otherwise damage the photos. I've read many reviews on this model and about half of the users said they had no issues while the others said the roller mechanism left lines or scratches on their old photos.
Would it be possible to scan batches of photos on a flatbed to save time or would it end up taking just as long as doing them one by one? I just don't know which model to get.
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I guess I can speak for this project since I have scanned in the last 11 months over 20K photos and negatives from my family dating back to 1906.
I chose the Epson v600 (I also use a v300 I also have) mostly because of the negative adapter that can scan up to ten 35mm negatives in one go. Also, my project was mostly 6x6 negatives and 35mm and only a small portion were prints (most photos were B&W and most 35mm were color).
One HUGE thing I missed in the first month or so was not taking advantage of the free SilverFast app that you can get the serial number directly from the publisher. Do not underestimate the quality of that app: as much as I hated it in the beginning (not intuitive, doesn't "look" like a Mac app, etc.) but it is a very powerful app that will save you a tone of time "cleaning up" your photos. Lear how to use at least the basic functions of the app and you will save yourself a lot of time on Photoshop later.
I still have 3 more trips' worth of photos I need to bring from my parents' home overseas, but despite their initial reluctancy in having any interest over me placing those scanned photos on a Synology, they find themselves spending a lot of their time looking at photos that for the last many years have been in albums they seldom look. Now, they are just a couple of clicks or taps away from any of the photos.
Also make sure you catalog your photos while you scan them them, much easier to find what you're looking for. I use the old method of naming as "YYYY_MM_DD Description of the photo or event". Most of the photos were entire films or series of films from specific trips so my Photo albums also follow the same naming convention, making it simple to sort or find by date. Hope this helps and let me know if I can be of any assistance. It's been an amazing project now toping my collection over 110K photos (not counting the last 10 years or so of phone and digital photos).
"not intuitive" is putting it lightly. It's great at what it does, but good lord does it have the absolute worst UI of any piece of software I've used in the last 40 years ago using computers.