[smitty825]

About a year ago, I was able to get my Mom hooked onto Digital Photography with a digital camera + iPhoto on her iBook, along with a photo printer. She currently loves having all of her photos in one place, that she can easily lookup, along with labeling each photo with a description.

I thought all was well, until she mentioned that she now wants all of her old photographs available digitally in iPhoto. She has 3 or 4 big boxes filled with photos, and it will be lots of work to digitize all of the photos.

...So, I'm asking the MacNN community...what sort of scanner should I look for? Is there anything that has something like a "sheet-feeder" on a copier? I'm looking for something as simple and automated as possible. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Thilo Ettelt]

Originally posted by smitty825:
About a year ago, I was able to get my Mom hooked onto Digital Photography with a digital camera + iPhoto on her iBook, along with a photo printer. She currently loves having all of her photos in one place, that she can easily lookup, along with labeling each photo with a description.

I thought all was well, until she mentioned that she now wants all of her old photographs available digitally in iPhoto. She has 3 or 4 big boxes filled with photos, and it will be lots of work to digitize all of the photos.

...So, I'm asking the MacNN community...what sort of scanner should I look for? Is there anything that has something like a "sheet-feeder" on a copier? I'm looking for something as simple and automated as possible. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Snapscan Touch (do these scanners still exist?). Well basically any scanner should do it. With Image Capture app it is easy to scan pictures. And scanners have become very cheap nowadays. There are however specialized scanners for negatives. Maybe those deliver more quality, but I have never tried one of these.


- Thilo

[zigzag]

You don't need much resolution to scan prints - 300 ppi is all you need unless you want to enlarge them. Even the cheapest scanners now have optical resolutions of at least 1200 ppi, so you don't need to spend more than $50 for, say, a Canon 3000. On those, you can put more than one photo on the flatbed and it will automatically create separate files for them. However, the Epson 2480LE is an auto-feeding photo scanner for less than $200 and is more likely what you want.

I've never used either one so I can't offer an opinion as to how well they work.

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

It will take up a ton of your time to do all those photos. Why don't you look into a place that will scan them all for you.

[smitty825]

Thanks for all of the advice! I'll look into that Epson scanner.

Disgruntled Head of C-3PO: What type of place does this service? Can I just take a bunch of photos to a Photo store, graphics shop, etc? Do you have any guess on price (say $1/image or $100/hr)? Anything I should look for? (I'm a software engineer, so I know nothing about photos/graphics, and every photo I have is digitized!)

[Goldfinger]

Originally posted by Thilo Ettelt:
There are however specialized scanners for negatives. Maybe those deliver more quality, but I have never tried one of these.

The difference in quality is rather huge. Flatbed scanners are a joke quality wise compared to dedicated slide/negative scanners. But these scanners are quite expensive, they start at 600-700 euro/$. If you want to scan prints a flatbed will do but be warned that you will waste countless days in color correting all these scans.

[Thilo Ettelt]

Originally posted by Goldfinger:
The difference in quality is rather huge. Flatbed scanners are a joke quality wise compared to dedicated slide/negative scanners. But these scanners are quite expensive, they start at 600-700 euro/$. If you want to scan prints a flatbed will do but be warned that you will waste countless days in color correting all these scans.

But I'm quite sure I saw one for 150 euros two weeks ago! (Maybe I'm wrong, I dunno)


- Thilo