Digitizing huge photo and slide archive

[Steviaz]

We need to digitize a huge archive of family photos dating back to 1940's?.
1. ~20 slide projector carousels with ~50 slides each.
2. ~15 photo albums with ~30 pages each holding 3x5 and 4x6 photos arranged on typical light sticky backing and clear overlay sheets
3. ~2000 loose photos in shoe boxes
4. ~20 prints mounted in frames of various sizes from around the house.

This is a project to send to the heirs of an estate. It is too big a task for us to do unless there is equipment that is feasible that will digitize large batches of photos at a time. Context metadata will be hardest to obtain/preserve.

QUESTIONS:
A) any companies that you trust to do the digitizing for one or more of these groups of pictures?
B) please reply if you have done or received results of a project like this. What went well? What would you change?
C) what is a fair price for each type of photos to convert and add basic metadata (date, event/location, original format, carousel#)
D) what is reasonable turnaround time for each photo type?
E) what other questions should we ask? What additional info do we need to provide for estimation?

 

[SeeRoy]

Hi. My own advice would be, perhaps, to bulk-scan the slides (and perhaps the prints too, if small) multiple-up on a flat-bed scanner. This will give a basic archival record. The client can then scrutinise them and order rescan of individual images up to whatever resolution required. Depending on the clients' abilities they could annotate a text file accompanying each scan with identifying metadata.

Edited to remove useless observations. I've done a bit of this work myself but have no relevant costing information.

Roy

 

[D Cox]

Using a camera with macro lens on a light box, 50 slides can be digitised easily in an hour. If they are in glass mounts, it would be best to transfer them to glassless mounts first - HAMA DSR mounts are still available. This avoids Newton's rings.

A whole album page with several prints can be scanned in one pass on a scanner such as an Epson 700. Software is around which will automatically find and separate the individual prints.

Likewise the loose prints can be scanned several at a time.

 

[Steviaz]

Thanks seeray and d cox for the initial ideas. While I like the idea of DIY I have a couple problems:
1. I start with no useful hardware beyond a reasonable desktop PC and a cheap multifunction printer.
2. For software I have and love windows 7 and windows live photo gallery. It meets my point-and-shoot use for many years but bulk insert will be a bit challenging (need scanner software to separate album page of photos, etc. )
3. This is a one time task. Buying and learning special hardware and software will be a challenge unless it is really quick and easy to operate. (i am a software tester familiar with computers, but no domain expertise in digitizing beyond basics for small batches)
4. My family is pretty busy right now. I feel it will take years to do this project fully if we do it all ourselves.

Others with a DSLR and smaller lot of photos and more time may love all DIY advice. My circumstances point to sending the photos to a trustworthy digitizing service. I'd love any recommendations.

I do like the suggestion of screening out duplicates and bad photos, capture all at a standard res, then do high res capture of a much smaller set of interesting photos.

What other tips and ideas do you have for this challenge?

 

[D Cox]

It seems you need to find somebody near you who does have the equipment and experience.

Where (in general terms) do you live ?

If in a metropolitan area, you might look for local camera clubs, or colleges with photography courses. Technical support staff at such a college might be interested in doing this kind of job as a side earner.

I doubt if the average weddings-and-portraits photographer would have the equipment or experience.

Having found a suitable person, I suggest giving them a sample to see how well they do.

 

[Eddaweaver]

I don't understand what relationship you have with the photos.

Are the negatives of the prints lost?

Although photographing slides can be quick it takes some skill to set up well enough to achieve worthwhile results.

Scanning well can be difficult and time consuming although less so for prints. Many peoples that do it for you are expensive and many won't do a particularly good job. There are post away services like digmypics but I'd be reluctant to entrust an entire family archive to the postal service.

For a flatbed scanner to scan prints I'd suggest the Epson V600. Take a look at my bookmarks for more information about scanning.

 

[jkoch2]

Steviaz wrote:

We need to digitize a huge archive of family photos dating back to 1940's?.

A better idea: pick 100-300 images that feature people the family can remember or associate with a story or important event. It will take work to label and date the digital images, whether on the photo itself or in the metadata, but have much more legacy value than 1,000s of images of whozits or whatzits that elders might recall, but which will mean nothing to later generations. Don't include other images, unless they convey places or objects of direct biographical or family interest, such as a first home, a favorite car, or how the soda shop on Main Street looked in '52 when Uncle Orville met Aunt Sadie and, losing his grip, spilled ice cream all over.

The optimum end result is something people will actually look at, at least once, and enjoy. Attention span will be less than 15 minutes unless the photos are well selected and presented. An animated slide show with narrative, titles, and complementary audio will take some work, but be appreciated. A disc with 5,000 photos, in vague chronological order, or maybe no order at all, won't score well.

More is less, less is more.

1. ~20 slide projector carousels with ~50 slides each.

Most of the work involves removing the slides from the carousel or cartridge, examining them, and putting them back where they were. For some infernal reason, most slide scanners available for sale require putting the slides in a little rack that slides through the device. This, too, takes lots of time.

2. ~15 photo albums with ~30 pages each holding 3x5 and 4x6 photos arranged on typical light sticky backing and clear overlay sheets

This involves either removing pictures, partially destroying some albums, and a big mess. There is also the problem of dust and paper debris, which look very ugly on the scanned photos. The platten must be carefully cleaned again and again. This is not easy to delegate to a commercial service, unless you pay a premium.

3. ~2000 loose photos in shoe boxes

Presumably unlabeled. Search for a 50-100 keepers. The rest can't be worth your trouble, if most were viewed little, if ever, by whoever took the pictures. [2,000 photos seems like a lot, until one considers the 10,000s or more digital photos people store these days, often without labeling or selection.]

4. ~20 prints mounted in frames of various sizes from around the house.

Probabably professional or antique portraits you can scan on any flatbed.

 

[Steviaz]

Seattle. I am sure there are companies that do digitization but I don't know any.

 

[Steviaz]

Thanks for the ideas. Perhaps I can cherry pick subset to DIY then have bulk of work outsourced. If lost then at least core will be preserved.

Thanks for scanner recommendation. Does it come with multiphoto detect and split software? If not then any recommended software?

 

[Steviaz]

Great stuff jkoch2. This is fantastic advice!!! Thanks for taking time to break down thoughts for each picture type.

Less is more makes this project doable. One challenge is there are several in the family with different values and some are not on speaking terms.

Ideally i would like to provide most of the good photos as a source plus a curated set for easy casual enjoyment.

Any additional advice from anyone is greatly appreciated. Thank you .

 

[DaveOl]

Some of the scanning services send your items to India, but it is still very expensive. At least $ .25-.50 per image. There is also the possibility of them getting lost. I agree, that possibly just pull out a few hundred and find a school with a photography class or club and inquire there.

 

[Craig Gillette]

I haven't looked too deeply into this but like many, have a lot of old family pictures, my own slides, etc. I do have a reasonably good flat bed scanner. It can scan slides. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the scanner brands or simple availability from a few years back has fallen off. There aren't as many scanners out there as there were. I'm not sure why but it might be that as film users were transitioning to digital use, they were actually shooting film but printing, archiving, delivering in more and more digital forms. Now that more people, if not most, are all digital, the demand has fallen off.

Here's the big problem. To do this right, it's a labor intensive process. There is a lot of handling of the source items, slides or negatives or prints. Quite often there is a lot of dust that must be removed, perhaps by software but often by hand, sometimes there are other physical problems like curved slides. so the type of scanner and or software may not deal well with those things. Kodachrome is beautiful but the slide film is "deeper" than other film types and again, the scanner may or may not deal well with it. None of this is insurmountable but can mean choosing to do it yourself will require careful research as to which scanners and software best fits your needs.

Aside from the possibility of dates being available on print edges or slide frames, on strips, etc., there is no information easily available to the tech doing the scanning to help in organizing and adding data. These days, though, there are programs that will make it comparatively easily to add data or organize images by the data and then retrieve images later.

This can mean having the work done can be kind of expensive but doing it yourself requires a substantial amount of time and not a little development of technical skills to deal with the software and hardware involved.

As some have suggested, a preliminary scan and organization of the originals may at least help to make it easier to find those that are suitable for selection and rescanning at higher resolutions, more time spent on color correction, dust corrections, etc.

The relatively limited number of existing large family framed prints, etc., will be relatively easy to deal with, lots of places will do individual print scanning and restoration.

While it's been a couple of years, I recall a well recommended scanning service in Arizona(?), had a fire on premises and lost a lot of originals that were in for processing. So you will probably want to consider doing any send out scanning in batches, both for considerations of loss at the destination or in transportation.

FWIW, I may choose to work my way through some of my old slides over time and then go back and redo some that might be especially interesting. As it is, it's likely that my heirs will get boxes of slides, some slide cubes, and a random assortment of boxes of family pictures in boxes, developer envelpes, etc.

 

[The Sage Knows]

I've saved a couple of bookmarks of some of the companies that do this service in the U.S. and appear reputable.

http://digitalmemoriesonline.net/about-digital-memories-scanning-and-digitizing-services.htm

http://www.pixmonix.com/pricing.php

As for my own experience, I've purchased both a Nikon Coolscan 5000 and an Imacon "virtual" drum scanner. They have excellent image quality, significantly more detail than a flatbed scanner. But over several years, I have only managed to get through a couple hundred slides and negatives. I have thousands!

The others have given you good advice regarding being selective.

Here is one more link I saved from another thread where somebody put together a spreadsheet of comparison pricing for outsourced work.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phRG-JoD0f6N8DrY8b8ZGLw

--
Robert

 

[chris_uk]

Send all of the archive here

Digitize Photos, Scanning & Video Transfer Services - ScanCafe

Our photo scanning & video transfer services allow you to digitally preserve photo, & film memories forever. Click here and find out why CNN Money ranked us #1!

www.scancafe.com

 

[AceP]

chris_uk wrote:

Send all of the archive here

http://www.scancafe.com

They've been rather hit or miss lately according to Yelpers,
http://www.yelp.com/biz/scancafe-inc-foster-city-2

Make sure you find out what extra charges could be lurking as any restoration adds significantly to the advertised price.

On the positive side, while the majority of archives still go to India for processing (80:5), they opened up a facility in the US (and another in Europe). This was a major negative in the minds of many folks who'd rather not send their originals overseas - regardless of how well packaged they were.

 

[AceP]

The Sage Knows wrote:

I've saved a couple of bookmarks of some of the companies that do this service in the U.S. and appear reputable.

http://digitalmemoriesonline.net/about-digital-memories-scanning-and-digitizing-services.htm

http://www.pixmonix.com/pricing.php

Beware of endorsements from famous magazines or celebrities. Try to actually find the entire article rather than a quote.

Yelp reviews give Pixmonix in Oregon only 2/5 stars (5/5 stars from their filtered or "suspicious" list). based on a handful of submissions.

The Digitalmemoriesonline store in Ohio does get 4/5 stars but with only one reviewer, it's hard to tell what the trend would be - http://www.yelp.com/biz/digital-memories-online-orient

 

[Steviaz]

This is perfect! Thank you Robert.

 

[Steviaz]

Yup. User reviews are better than magazine or company website if there are enough of them. Reputable magazine/ source would help, but in this case I need as many tidbits as I can find.

Thank you.

 

[Steviaz]

Great stuff. Thanks chris_uk and AceP.