For the past two weeks, I’ve spent nearly every waking moment that I’ve been at home scanning photos. I borrowed a great film scanner from our companys photo club with the idea of finally scanning all of my old slides and negatives that have been taken before going mostly digital some years ago.

I thought it’d make a fun one-weekend project.

Yeah, right. Turns out that was a rather naive conception of the momentous task that lay ahead of me. Over the days that followed, I discovered some interesting stuff and learned the following, listed here so that should anyone ever attempt such a thing, you have been warned:

  • Never underestimate the number of photos you have. When encasing slides, they go through the process of quality selection at that step, so I thought I only have maybe a few hundred. Wrong.
  • Never underestimate the number of important photos that “must” be scanned. With negatives, I thought I could easily skip, say, 80% of them as uninteresting. Again, I was wrong – turns out there are so many priceless and supposedly priceless (=embarrassing) photos from the good old days that I had to scan the vast majority of them.
  • Never underestimate the time it takes to scan everything – a good scan takes at least two minutes per photo. That may not sound like much until you have a stack of a couple thousand photos in front of you and you start doing the math.. :|
  • What all this means is that if you have lots of photos, don’t even think you can scan them all. Not in a weekend, not in a week, not in a month. It takes a long time.
  • Perhaps most surprisingly, never underestimate the amount of disk space the scans will take. A good 4000dpi, 42bpp raw scan yields a 120MB+ file. That also may not sound like much until you’re looking at a folder with 200GB+ of photos in it..
  • Think about backups. With 120MB raw-files, the willingness to back up on DVD-Rs dramatically diminishes as your diskspace consumption tops 100 GB. In the end, buying a second (or a third, fourth or whateverth) hard disk may be the best choice.
  • Reserve (a lot of) time for some serious post-processing. This is a phase that’s yet to be done for the most part, but it’s clear that while good automagic dust-removal things work magic and save thousands of hours of time, you’re still looking at one heck of a big project of categorization, keywording, rating, rotating, color-correcting, cropping and what-not.

To make a long story short and put it mildly, it’s one tedious process. But it is nice when you’re able to find some good old stuff from the archives that you’ve forgotten about. Also, it was interesting to re-scan some photos that had been scanned earlier by the photo developer – the improvement in image quality is quite amazing.

Now, in order to have some real contents in this post also, here are a few random examples. First, a couple of photos of Noora, my St Bernard from something like 15 years ago. She was one cute and wonderful dog, although you can imagine the amount of drool generated during warm summers.. ;) They’re followed by some stalactites from an Ohio cave, spring in New York City in 2001, St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and a random flower shot. Click the thumbnails to open the entire photo.