My mother recently died and among her possessions are boxes of historical pictures. I made a very quick review and these go back to the last 1800s and early 1900s.

I'm thinking of organizing then scanning them in a way to preserve family history.

Hoping someone on the forum has completed a similar exercise and can share tips - both in approach and equipment. For example, suggesting which scanners I should consider and what is the best software to organize the pictures.

Thanks in advance

Yo u may want to investigate Legacy Box. My experience with them was first class.

Scanning pictures like that is less fun than watching paint dry. There are a lot of professional options.

If you are concerned with shipping them I'm sure there is a company in your area that can do it.

It will take plenty enough time just to caption and organize them.

Been there, done that, threw away the t-shirt...

I vote do it yourself.

1) You don't have to risk losing or having someone else damage your originals.

2) It's cheaper.

3) You control the quality of the output.

However, a few questions:

How many photos are you talking about? Do you have a pretty fast computer with lots of RAM?

What kind of output are you looking for? The highest possible quality for future proofing? Or just "good enough" JPEGs to put on a TV for the family to watch. Are you a photography enthusiast? Are you willing to touch up the photos yourself? Are you willing to pay someone to touch up the photos?

Personally, if I was "archiving" photos for forever, I would scan the photos in a 48-bit Raw format at 2400 or 3600dpi. Each photo will probably be 100-150mb large, and probably take 90 seconds or more to scan and store. These I would store away. Then I would let the included scanner software create a color and dust/scratch corrected JPEG copy that I could put into the digital photo album to be shared or viewed.

With the 48-bit raw files, you could come back years down the road and re-touch the photos as technology improves. 10 years from now, they'll probably have AI powered photo retouching software that can restore photos way more effectively than what they have now.

If I were to get a scanner, I'd probably get this one: https://www.amazon.com/Epson-P..._product_top?ie=UTF8

I scanned a box of old family photos a few years ago. I used the highest quality scan available on my HP flatbed scanner, and then cropped and edited each picture individually as needed. The key is to take your time. Set one (or more) up on the bed, make sure the scan is set up correctly, hit start, and come back a little later to see the results. Save, crop, and edit as needed; rescan if you don't like the results. Repeat. If you're not in a big hurry, it can work well and you don't risk losing your photos in shipping or in the scanner's production department.

Here are two examples (since PB won't allow 3rd party hosting without paying exhorbitant fees):

Grandmother and her little brother, about 1903[/URL] <img src="http://i832.photobucket.com/albums/zz244/VStarTraveler/JWSF-JS-About%201903_zpsxypdmqlg.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo JWSF-JS-About 1903_zpsxypdmqlg.jpg"/>

Great grandparents, about 1903[URL=<img src="http://i832.photobucket.com/albums/zz244/VStarTraveler/DMS-TS-About%201900_zps1qifydsx.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo DMS-TS-About 1900_zps1qifydsx.jpg"/>][/URL]

.

If you scan them yourself, think about a naming convention for the file name that is consistent and descriptive.

For example.
Don't use A78456.pdf as the file name because it is not descriptive and the file name means nothing.

Don't use Grandma_1865 because who's Grandmother is it? You Mom's Mom or your Dad's Mom.

Use a file name that helps you down the road and makes sense to the entire family including those who are not yet born.

For example:
MarySue SR_Releigh NC_Bentonville Battlefield_April 1865

if the picture also included your Great Uncle Bob, I suggest you make a copy of the scan and name the 2nd file after him. Yes, you will have duplicates, but when you have several hundred pics and you are trying to find the ones with a specific person ~ having duplicates helps. Now if you find a software package that works like FaceBook where you can tag each person ~ Please let me know the name of that program!!!

BillyBob SR_Releigh NC_Bentonville Battlefield_April 1865

In these examples, using actual names (MarySue SR and BillyBob SR) let's all the family find pictures. Remember, your Great Grandmother might be Great Aunt to one of your Cousins.

I put the location (if known) as the 2nd part of the file name and the date (if known) as the last part.

Don't limit yourself, let's say Great Uncle Billy was wounded at this Civil War battle. Add that to the file name:
BillyBob SR_Releigh NC_Wounded at Bentonville Battle_April 1865

If the file name is too long, you will get an error message from your computer's operating system.

If you have several hundred pictures, just scanning everything will take a lot of time. just scan them, but arrange a pot luck with as many Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins as you can gather up and get a projection system for everyone to see the pics. Change the file names as your family and you are able to identify what the picture contains. If you don't know, it's okay to put "Unknown" in the file name or use vague descriptions like:
"maybe BillyBob SR_Unknown Bar_around 1902"
if you just have a guess of what the pic contains.

Before you scan a lot of pictures at once, try to organize them. If there are several pictures from one wedding, scan them together so when you show them at the pot luck they fall in order.

Scanners set too high will scan bumps on the paper as part of the picture. Don't automatically set the quality at the highest dots per inch (dpi) or bits per pixel because a lower setting usually captures a better copy of the image.

If you are going to do these yourself get a program that lets you batch edit.

I'm going to have to fire up an older computer to get the name of the program I used to use but it would let me tag raw images and then also generate a tagged JPEG of whatever size and quality you wanted. I used it to generate thumbnails for my photo ordering website.

Depending on the number of photogs I had working for me it wasn't unusual to end up with 8-10k photos at some of the larger tournaments. I had to be able to batch large amounts in a hurry.

The guy I really envied was a guy from Chattanooga who shot the really big cheer events. He would have 2 photogs working per stage (usually about 10 stages running) so he had 20 photogs shooting 8-10 hours non-stop.

With his system every time a photog dumped a card which was done at a laptop sitting next to the photog the images auto batched. This allowed them to be on his viewing stations by the time mommy and daddy walked up with little buffy. He printed on site and averaged around $100k per event. Over head was high though. His cameras and lenses had to be refurbished a couple of times per year.

Unless your grandma was loquacious, your biggest problem will probably be just identifying who is in the pictures.

flashguy

I used one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/Epson-P...pson+perfection+v37q

To batch scan family photos and negatives. The scanner will automatically detect and individually number photos. Then you can go through and name them. You can set how much detail, file size etc. It was easy, but takes time.

All of these were scanned with the epson, many are hi-res:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/...ms/72157628129997616