Help! Seven generations of family photos

[pagpow]

Hard to tell where to post this. The Image Processing forum didn't seem quite right, nor does this.

With the passing of my father last year, I became custodian for a lifetime’s worth of slides (my mother had pre-deceased him). With the sunsetting of my maternal aunt, I have now seen several generations of photographs and documents, some going back to the 1850s. This makes no mention of my own photos of four generations, my parents, ours, our children’s, and our grandchildren’s. Large volume of both photos, both slides and prints, and documents.

I started looking for someone to scan them and the responses suggested a number of approaches, including a database. I recall photo filing software from years ago, but never tried it. Some suggest Filemaker Pro.

I’m looking at any wisdom you might have about how best to digitize, store, and retrieve them. Thoughts from experience? Equipment? Workflow? Serious mistakes to avoid? I am Mac-based.

Many thanks.

Giorgio

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Buy albums and sort photos you have.
For film get archival sleeves, they are not expensive and you could write notes for every stripe of film at some of them.
Get flatbed scanner with film support to digitize prints and film.
Lightroom to tag them all.
Tagging makes big difference. Flickr supports LR tags, you could use Flickr as on-line storage.

 

[Ronny]

Make it like this, (In swedish):
http://guld.moderskeppet.se/kurser/kurs/rawbilder-cc/15_Fota+dina+äldre+bilder

 

[philipus]

It seems to me the first question (or at least one of the first) you should answer is what will you use the images for; what is the purpose of the scanning?

If it is, simply, to preserve digital copies of the images then you'll be content with modern flatbed scanners or digitizing. The scans will be sufficient for internet posting, most printing needs etc.

However, if you wish to preserve the highest quality digital copy you can (within your budget) create then the best option (though the most expensive) is to have a professional scan service do it. That said, you need to be able to trust that professional. You could also consider scanning the collection yourself, which will give you full control over the process and will probably be cheaper than using a scan service, but will take up your own time.

Assuming the purpose is the former, i.e. to preserve a digital copy, then digitizing with an SLR will likely be the fastest way; once it has been set up it will be very quick. Note that digitizing will leave dust and scratches in the digital files since there's no digital ICE (I think I read somewhere of a Kodak (?) piece of software that allowed the equivalent of digital ICE on image files but I forget what it was called). Digitizing is also comparably cheap equipment-wise.

If you want to go the scanning route, the negative and (printed) image formats of your photographs will have an impact on the equipment you'll use. Dedicated slide scanners will scan 35mm and (some scanners) MF and will give (much) better quality than consumer flatbeds, like the Epsons (pro flatbeds like iQ Smarts will give excellent quality but will cost much more). If you have varying image formats then a flatbed or digitizing with an SLR will likely be the most versatile solution (and will also be cheap).

As for workflow, I'd consider the following options.

The order of your images pre-scan. Depending on your collection, this will involve considering 1) the chronology of the images, 2) the format of the images and, probably in your case, 3) the photographer. There's a bit of tension between these three concepts (and any other you may wish to add to the mix) so you should have a think about this. This ties in with tagging, of course, which can be done after the fact.

Organisation of the collection after the scan. This may affect the naming convention you use for the images. Of course, tagging can sort (pun intended, because why not) this out to a certain extent. Do you want them chronologically? If so, set up a naming convention for the files that suits.

Software. There are a few options, such as Lightroom and Bridge but depending on how complex your collection is, you can also use Finder/Windows Explorer and just place the images in chronologically-named folders.

Tagging. Try to arrive at tags to use beforehand. This may require some creative thinking, but tags that may be useful are photographer, country, location, date, film/camera/lens used, occasion, people in the photo, etc.

There are likely lots of other things to consider too, and the above is perhaps old hat and stuff you've been told before so take it fwiw.

Here's an interesting article about scanning 200,000 slides. And here are a few digitizing links I've come across over the years:

http://www.trippingthroughthedark.com/scanning-a-lot-of-film/

http://www.pekkapotka.com/journal/2012/11/11/copying-slides-with-om-d-and-60mm-macro.html

http://dpbestflow.org/camera-scan-workflow

http://dpbestflow.org/camera-scanning

http://thedambook.com/smf/index.php?board=7.0

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/report/1934699/hybrid-copy

https://www.google.nl/search?q=photo.net+digitizing+slides+using+a+slide+duplicator+site:photo.net


Good luck
Philip

 

[pagpow]

Wow!! First my apologies for the lack of timely acknowledgement for the help. I was diverted from the project by life -- don't you hate it when that happens? Then thanks, Ko.Fe. and Ronny, and even more thanks Philip for your comprehensive reply and set of urls. Very nice.

Giorgio

 

[DNG]

I am in a similar situation..

I use a V700 Flatbed, though, I don't tag, and such.. I do the free Flickr of 1TB (350,000 10mp files) to upload and each set in a dedicated set.
(IE: Trip to Italy, Army Photos, Events) see my Flickr Here, this is how I do my sets for my Dads huge collection of photography in all media forms available...
Negatives (35mm to 4x5), Slides (35mm to 6x6), Prints, 2x2 to 8x10).

I also have 6x6 and 4x5 Negative archive sleeves, and will get 5x7x2 8x10 sleeves to hold any print size.

I also use negative sleeves that allow a Contact Sheet to stored with it.
And I also mark what was on the Slide Box or Negative envelope to have a record of any info my Dad wrote on them..

Having many 3 ring binders with the "Slanted" backbone to have a place to organize them when you are done Scanning etc..
The Binders have a place to put a small note card for the content of the Binder.