When my Dad passed away in March, I knew he had lots of family photos in boxes that I'd have to go through. But I didn't know he had literally hundreds of pictures, way too many to display or put in bulky albums.

I want to scan them all and have plenty of room on portable hard drives. But the problem is that I don't want to use my regular printer scanner because the sheer number of photos will probably wear it out and ruin a great printer.

Does anyone have an idea for a good hi-res color scanner that will stand up to several straight days of heavy use?

Thanks!

It might be better to pay someine else to do it: https://legacybox.com

If you must DIY, buy a dedicated photo scanner, like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01H...gid=pla-384873896628

We bought my grandpa legacy boxes, a lot of them. I need to find out if he has the disks yet. They seem to be a little more pricey than other options. The benefit is they are very easy. Load up box of whatever (slides, pics, reel to reel, VHS, BETA) mail it to them in their box, get disk(s) back.

ETA VHS is now so old, my phone didn't accept it as a word and auto corrected it.

I had to do this myself after losing family members and ended up with thousands of negatives, slides and pictures. (Many of these pictures were the only copy left and quite sentimentally valuable).

In my case I went with a slightly older firewire-capable scanner, a Canon 9950f. The reason I went with this model was it came with a full selection of slide/negative/film holders w/lighted lid. Much heavier made than most of the current scanners.
(You may have some people tell you some older scanners are not compatible with Windows 10 or Mac- that's wrong. Most ANY scanner can be if you do a little research), although the original software may not work.
I found what worked best was to get a Twain driver and scan directly into Photoshop or use something like Vuescan as the scanning app, which I found was one of the best performing. Vuescan is available for PC or Mac.

One little observation about the feed-type scanners. If you have old pictures that are fragile and have cracks/broken sections this is NOT the scanner for you. Flat tray scanners are much friendlier for that type of delicate scanning, and allow scanning of multiple pictures at a time.
Most important, if the pictures are old enough to have begun flaking/shedding paper you'll end up with debris in the optics on that type.
(Ran into this originally).

I found another one of these Canons later and have one on a Mac and one on a Alienware. A scanner like this is tough enough to do what you want- I've already scanned over probably 1,800 slides, films and photos.

In the case of my photos I found that only a small percentage of the older pictures did not require some level of repair/cleaning. With this required volume of Photoshop work and scanning it can get quite expensive if farmed out. The physical scanning is the easiest part- the cleanup takes longer-

Start with the easy photos and save the damaged ones for late night quiet work.

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
We bought my grandpa legacy boxes, a lot of them. I need to find out if he has the disks yet. They seem to be a little more pricey than other options. The benefit is they are very easy. Load up box of whatever (slides, pics, reel to reel, VHS, BETA) mail it to them in their box, get disk(s) back.

ETA VHS is now so old, my phone didn't accept it as a word and auto corrected it.

How much correction will Legacybox do? That’s the time consumer and skilled labor part of it which might make the price worthwhile.

For work I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap that has a sheet-feed fax machine type feeder. It scans to pdfs and has very good resolution. Its $400-$450 though.

quote:

Originally posted by snoris:
When my Dad passed away in March, I knew he had lots of family photos in boxes that I'd have to go through. But I didn't know he had literally hundreds of pictures, way too many to display or put in bulky albums.

I want to scan them all and have plenty of room on portable hard drives. But the problem is that I don't want to use my regular printer scanner because the sheer number of photos will probably wear it out and ruin a great printer.

Does anyone have an idea for a good hi-res color scanner that will stand up to several straight days of heavy use?

Thanks!

Legacy Box sponsors Rush Limbaugh. Use the code ‘Rush’ for 40 percent off your first order.

I assume you guys were happy with Legacy Box’s service? I need to look into something like this too.

Much color and exposure correction can be done after scanning using something like Lightroom.

I am in the process of digitizing thousands of slides. I have a very good scanner, a Nikon ED5000 and a slide feeder. However, I prefer using my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, tethered to my computer, and a simple Nikon slide copy holder that holds the slide in front of a macro lens, with an LED panel in front of the copy holder to illuminate the slide. This allows me to focus and adjust the slide prior to copying, and is if anything faster, and certainly equal in resolution, to the slide scanner.

Now for prints, I use a Fujitsu scanner that has both a flat bed and a feeder. You can use a print holder to decrease the risk of damage to the print running it through the scan feeder.

If it were a matter of hundreds of prints rather than thousands of slides, I would send them to a service, have them digitize the prints, then make corrections with the digitized copies.