Scan old photos in small lots

I received an e-mail from Dan a Good Booter who after six months of procrastination decided it was time to fulfill his New Years resolution to scan, edit and organize his print photos.
A New Years resolution I had suggested.
　
The reason for his e-mail was a tongue in cheek notice he was suing me for as he put it, causing him to become a Trichotillomaniac (a person with an uncontrolled impulse or compulsion to pull out their own hair).

His tail of woe went something like this. Before he began scanning his prints he decided to sit comfortably before his TV and remove literally many hundreds of prints from their albums. And do so without sorting them by album. He figured he could sort them after he had scanned them onto his computer. Certainly a possibility, but in Dan’s case a bad decision.

For as Dan discovered after many hours of scanning individual prints and attempting to edit them on the fly, he was slowly going mad with the boredom. But because he had denuded his albums of their prints without sorting them by album, it would take as long to sort and remount them to albums as it would to scan them.

If you’re one of those who might be considering a print scanning regimen, I’ve a few suggestions.

1. Gather your prints to be scanned in manageable collections. Don’t ravage all your albums.
2. Set aside a specific time each day, week or month to scan. Perhaps during a favorite talking head radio broadcast.
3. Do not attempt to scan and then edit each print. Save the editing until you recover from the boredom of scanning, You’ll be much more patient when editing. And you might discover some aren’t worth editing.
4. When shopping for a photo editing program consider Photoshop Elements 7. It’ll cost you about $80 dollars but will have all the features you’ll probably ever need to edit your photos.

And here’s the best part. It has a feature that allows you to place as many prints as will fit on your flatbed, scan them all and then with one click, separate the multiple scan into individual digital photos.

Think of it this way. If you’ve 600 prints to be scanned, Photoshop Elements will reduce most of your scans from 600 to 150 to 100 scans.

Photoshop Elements and a $100 to $150 scanner is a less expensive way to preserve your photos than having them processionally scanned.

Here’s wishing you a Good Boot.