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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 11 months ago by Goldengirl_1977@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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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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[–] OurDumbCentury@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I have both of those scanners and I consider them precision tools for different jobs. This year, I've scanned 10,000+ photos including print, slides, and negatives.

If you're dealing with small format print photos, go with the FastFoto. Not only will it save you hundreds of hours, it has a wide variety of tools and settings you can tweak to get great results. Scanning using the flatbed will take you about 30 seconds to 1 minute per photo depending on how much you can pre-prepare with an assembly line setup. The Fastphoto can do 50 photos in that same amount of time depending on your settings.

I did not have any issues with damaging photos. I actually had photos damage the machine, if there was glue or an errant staple in the pile. But I managed to clean it off and repair it without issue.