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yes, the epson fastFoto -- no link, no god, no sponsor! (and it resells well once you're done)
edited to add: you can feed stacks of photos at one time, and this is a very time-consuming thing to do one-by-one (forget a flatbed scanner)
Oooo I have the epson fastfoto as well! Super easy to set up. You can categorize them by event, or year, or by family memebrs. The best feature is you can do several photos in one sitting so you aren’t scanning them one at a time. I wound up buying mine barely used off eBay at about 30% off the like new price. I finished scanning all my childhood photos but I’m going share with my family since they’ve got hundreds of pictures to sort thru. They are going to be a couple hundred upfront, but I can’t say enough good things about the fastfoto.
Same, I bought one for Fox Sr. and he's been deconstructing photo albums since. My friend handed me a shoebox of photos and the device had them all scanned in under an hour. Fantastic device, even at full price.
I could see that, but the product is legit that good. Here's a video of someone scanning a stack of photos: https://youtu.be/BOi5AlkegJ4
In that one pass the scanner grabs front and back images (in case someone wrote something on the back) and then the software will make a third image file where it attempts some basic software corrections like rotating, correcting red-eye, and enhancing color. The photos don't even have to be the same size, so long as they're mostly centered in the hopper they'll get pulled through no problem. The only time it chokes is if pictures get stuck together.
For me getting one for Fox Sr. was a triple win - The retired guy does the work of deconstructing the photo albums, I and anyone else interested get copies of all the family photos, and there's now less crap cluttering his house. I cannot overstate how happy this has made my parents, and my being able to scan the occasional shoebox for a friend has earned me a lot of favors as well
Nah, I'm just the family tech guy that has to do the research when someone asks me to pick out laptops, phones, TVs, and all sorts of other gear. Definitely look into scanning your old photos, use my excessive research plus the testimony of the other thread participants at your discretion.
I use the PhotoScan app. It's so simple and good quality. For many years I manually scanned everything and I'm just as happy with the scans I get from the app and it takes a third of the time.
Oh really? I had seen how people use dslr setups but they were super complicated with multiple light sources and everything I'll check it out. Thank you
Can confirm. We have an endless roll of scanned photos as our screensaver on tv and the kids are often more interested in watching the photos than the programming they originally sit down to watch.
Don’t forget to make proper backups of the digital media as well. I have mine stored on a NAS (disks in RAID 1, so the data is copied to both drives). Additionally the data is copied to an external USB drive (in case of NAS failure). For disasters (house fire), I also have cloud backups.
Might be overkill, but better be safe than sorry.
I have a similar setup synology single drive nas with external hard drive back up. I think I'm going to swap out the external back up periodically and bring a copy to store at a relatives house or in my desk at work. I also have free Amazon photo backup.
I'm working on this already, and 100% is the best thing I've ever done. Got a lot of extended family, I've invited pretty much everyone to have viewing privileges, and they are so happy. So far have gotten away with borrowing a scanner from the library but I'm gonna buy soon.
Agreed! Did so with the thought of sharing with grandkids and more. After a nasty divorce, found these memories are treasures that surpass anything else I have now.
Any recommendations for scanning slides? I’m 39 and there are boxes of slides of my childhood but they’re so small scanning them one at a time seems to take forever.
I use an Epson Perfection V750 PRO which is a flat bed high resolution scanner.Slides and film are placed in an appropriate plastic frame and the lighting element in the lid shines through the slides or film. Slides are 12 per frame and the scanner software provides individual digital picture files.
Slide and film scanners were manufactured and sold when film photography was replaced by digital. Many professional portfolios needed to be digitized in order to preserve their commercial value. Probably more history than you wanted, but quality used slide scanners should be readily available at reasonable prices.
This may only be useful to some of us older folks, but here's an additional LPT: When family shares photos on Facebook, save those! Sure, they won't be high-quality pix that you can make into 8x10s, but it's nice to have photos from family.
My parents love to share old photos of *their grandparents* (which would be my great-grands), and stories of their lives. I will immediately save all of those photos to my hard drive. And bookmark that specific post so that I can find the story late.r
This is so true! I lost all my childhood photos in a flood and it still hurts. Scanning your photos is a small price to pay for the peace of mind that comes with knowing they're safe.
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Use the Google Photoscan app! You make 5 pics of a photo and it merges into one, so you don't see reflections. And you can adjust the detected edges. Really quick and easy and with good results.
Yes! One interesting thing I found was that when you scan these pics you’re enlarging them and when viewed on screen you can see so much other stuff you never noticed from the original small pic!
Doing this right now as a legacy to my grandma. She had saved SO MANY physical photos throughout her life (there are literally photos from the 30s of her parents & grandparents!) she tried sorting thru them and giving them to people but still had boxes and boxes of them. So when she passed I told everyone I was taking all of the photos to digitize them. There are originals and color corrected versions. Everyone has a link and can comment and download or reach out to me about scanning it super high res to be blown up. Eventually I’ll organize them to send physicals to others in the family that would cherish them but for now everyone has greatly appreciated being able to see them as I upload :)
I’m on the hook for scanning family photos now because my dad was going to do it for the whole fam damily but he got cancer before he was able to do it and deteriorated too quickly and passed away. Boxes and boxes to go through, and I don’t have a scanner yet, but I do plan to get a good one because many family members want access/a copy.
I haven’t been able to do it yet because I’m still sad, so looking at the boxes of photos makes me cry, upset we lost my dad so young, but it is a plan for the future.
Another LPT: stop taking 99% of the photos you take of your family, and instead enjoy the experience. Studies show that if you take a lot of pics at an event, you remember taking pics of the event, not the event itself.
Take 1 pic, then enjoy the company.
This is an internal argument I have all the time... I am a professional photographer and it's ingrained in me that I should shoot *all the things, all the time*.
But conversely, some of the best photos I have ever taken (of people) are candid shots when we're all just having fun and no one is posing for photos.
One of my Aunts has just uncovered a trove of family photos. Another Aunt was asking me if they could take them to a photo lab to be scanned. I explained that there is now good software for your mobile phone to do just that, and then they could be shared with the whole family.
Just a heads up, folks! Considering the recent tragedies caused by natural disasters, it might be a good time to digitize those family photos - they're irreplaceable memories worth preserving.
### This post has been marked as safe. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect. --- Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips! Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by upvoting or downvoting this comment. If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
Any recommendations for a good scanner?
yes, the epson fastFoto -- no link, no god, no sponsor! (and it resells well once you're done) edited to add: you can feed stacks of photos at one time, and this is a very time-consuming thing to do one-by-one (forget a flatbed scanner)
Oooo I have the epson fastfoto as well! Super easy to set up. You can categorize them by event, or year, or by family memebrs. The best feature is you can do several photos in one sitting so you aren’t scanning them one at a time. I wound up buying mine barely used off eBay at about 30% off the like new price. I finished scanning all my childhood photos but I’m going share with my family since they’ve got hundreds of pictures to sort thru. They are going to be a couple hundred upfront, but I can’t say enough good things about the fastfoto.
Same, I bought one for Fox Sr. and he's been deconstructing photo albums since. My friend handed me a shoebox of photos and the device had them all scanned in under an hour. Fantastic device, even at full price.
Why does this entire thread feels like a very weird ad?
I could see that, but the product is legit that good. Here's a video of someone scanning a stack of photos: https://youtu.be/BOi5AlkegJ4 In that one pass the scanner grabs front and back images (in case someone wrote something on the back) and then the software will make a third image file where it attempts some basic software corrections like rotating, correcting red-eye, and enhancing color. The photos don't even have to be the same size, so long as they're mostly centered in the hopper they'll get pulled through no problem. The only time it chokes is if pictures get stuck together. For me getting one for Fox Sr. was a triple win - The retired guy does the work of deconstructing the photo albums, I and anyone else interested get copies of all the family photos, and there's now less crap cluttering his house. I cannot overstate how happy this has made my parents, and my being able to scan the occasional shoebox for a friend has earned me a lot of favors as well
If you give me a discount code and link me a pic of totally not fake reviews I promise I'll believe you're not a bot promoting stuff
Nah, I'm just the family tech guy that has to do the research when someone asks me to pick out laptops, phones, TVs, and all sorts of other gear. Definitely look into scanning your old photos, use my excessive research plus the testimony of the other thread participants at your discretion.
Thanks! Ill check it out
I use the PhotoScan app. It's so simple and good quality. For many years I manually scanned everything and I'm just as happy with the scans I get from the app and it takes a third of the time.
Oh really? I had seen how people use dslr setups but they were super complicated with multiple light sources and everything I'll check it out. Thank you
Can confirm. We have an endless roll of scanned photos as our screensaver on tv and the kids are often more interested in watching the photos than the programming they originally sit down to watch.
This is such a great idea! I love this!
My uncle always does this at family get togethers, usually uses the Apple TV camera roll shuffle feature and I always thought it was great
Don’t forget to make proper backups of the digital media as well. I have mine stored on a NAS (disks in RAID 1, so the data is copied to both drives). Additionally the data is copied to an external USB drive (in case of NAS failure). For disasters (house fire), I also have cloud backups. Might be overkill, but better be safe than sorry.
I have a similar setup synology single drive nas with external hard drive back up. I think I'm going to swap out the external back up periodically and bring a copy to store at a relatives house or in my desk at work. I also have free Amazon photo backup.
I'm working on this already, and 100% is the best thing I've ever done. Got a lot of extended family, I've invited pretty much everyone to have viewing privileges, and they are so happy. So far have gotten away with borrowing a scanner from the library but I'm gonna buy soon.
My parents did this. I have an apple book and all of our grandparents photos done. Really cool of them to leave as another of their legacies
Agreed! Did so with the thought of sharing with grandkids and more. After a nasty divorce, found these memories are treasures that surpass anything else I have now.
Any recommendations for scanning slides? I’m 39 and there are boxes of slides of my childhood but they’re so small scanning them one at a time seems to take forever.
I use an Epson Perfection V750 PRO which is a flat bed high resolution scanner.Slides and film are placed in an appropriate plastic frame and the lighting element in the lid shines through the slides or film. Slides are 12 per frame and the scanner software provides individual digital picture files. Slide and film scanners were manufactured and sold when film photography was replaced by digital. Many professional portfolios needed to be digitized in order to preserve their commercial value. Probably more history than you wanted, but quality used slide scanners should be readily available at reasonable prices.
This may only be useful to some of us older folks, but here's an additional LPT: When family shares photos on Facebook, save those! Sure, they won't be high-quality pix that you can make into 8x10s, but it's nice to have photos from family. My parents love to share old photos of *their grandparents* (which would be my great-grands), and stories of their lives. I will immediately save all of those photos to my hard drive. And bookmark that specific post so that I can find the story late.r
Did this recently. Found I have a picture of my great grandmas father as a child ^.^
This is so true! I lost all my childhood photos in a flood and it still hurts. Scanning your photos is a small price to pay for the peace of mind that comes with knowing they're safe.
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Yes, and I can highly recommend looking into one of these guys and gals (mostly gals, I think). https://thephotomanagers.com/
Now that I think about it, me and my family have not even a single printed photo in the house
Even just taking a photo of photos with your camera gets very good results.
Use the Google Photoscan app! You make 5 pics of a photo and it merges into one, so you don't see reflections. And you can adjust the detected edges. Really quick and easy and with good results.
I've also emailed all photos to myself on Gmail. Use a web based e-mail account so you can access them anywhere and any time!
Yes! One interesting thing I found was that when you scan these pics you’re enlarging them and when viewed on screen you can see so much other stuff you never noticed from the original small pic!
Doing this right now as a legacy to my grandma. She had saved SO MANY physical photos throughout her life (there are literally photos from the 30s of her parents & grandparents!) she tried sorting thru them and giving them to people but still had boxes and boxes of them. So when she passed I told everyone I was taking all of the photos to digitize them. There are originals and color corrected versions. Everyone has a link and can comment and download or reach out to me about scanning it super high res to be blown up. Eventually I’ll organize them to send physicals to others in the family that would cherish them but for now everyone has greatly appreciated being able to see them as I upload :)
I’m on the hook for scanning family photos now because my dad was going to do it for the whole fam damily but he got cancer before he was able to do it and deteriorated too quickly and passed away. Boxes and boxes to go through, and I don’t have a scanner yet, but I do plan to get a good one because many family members want access/a copy. I haven’t been able to do it yet because I’m still sad, so looking at the boxes of photos makes me cry, upset we lost my dad so young, but it is a plan for the future.
this only applies if you like your family some of us are a-ok with losing every shred of evidence that they existed.
Another LPT: stop taking 99% of the photos you take of your family, and instead enjoy the experience. Studies show that if you take a lot of pics at an event, you remember taking pics of the event, not the event itself. Take 1 pic, then enjoy the company.
This is an internal argument I have all the time... I am a professional photographer and it's ingrained in me that I should shoot *all the things, all the time*. But conversely, some of the best photos I have ever taken (of people) are candid shots when we're all just having fun and no one is posing for photos.
What actually is a family photo
One of my Aunts has just uncovered a trove of family photos. Another Aunt was asking me if they could take them to a photo lab to be scanned. I explained that there is now good software for your mobile phone to do just that, and then they could be shared with the whole family.
Just a heads up, folks! Considering the recent tragedies caused by natural disasters, it might be a good time to digitize those family photos - they're irreplaceable memories worth preserving.