Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Digitizing old family photos -- flatbed or auto-feed/top-load scanner? (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I very strongly recommend an auto-feed scanner! I have tried flatbeds, negative scanners and commercial services. Then I found a used Epson FastFoto FF-680W auto-feed scanner, and honestly, I would never go back! The quality is excellent and they are unbelievably fast! You will save SO much time!

If you’re scanning family-type photos the source quality is never perfect anyway. Much MUCH better to free up time for organizing, labeling, tagging etc all the photos — and to have time to actually watch them with family and friends.

Not once has a photo been damaged for me. But even if that would happen to 1% of the thousands of photos: so what? Better that you get them digitized in a reasonable amount of time, than that you treat them like unique collector’s items. In my experience, if you dont scan the, now, the likeleyhood of them beimg just lost or thrown away in the future is very high.