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How to Preserve Physical Photos

(ente.io)
79 points goodburb | 2 comments | 22 Jul 24 16:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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sxp ◴[27 Jul 24 04:45 UTC] No.41084509[source]▶
Related question: what's the best way to digitize a collection of physical photos for personal use?

I ran into this problem recently for a family reunion where we wanted a slideshow of photos that were decades old. The best solution was to manually scan them using Google Photoscan which involves taking a 5 pictures of each photo with a phone and letting the app remove reflection, perform skew correction, crop, etc. This resulted in better photos than just using the phone's default camera software, but it still took 10+ seconds for each photo.

Does anyone have an recommendation for at home photoscanners that would allow me to drop a stack of photos into it and have it automatically scan them? I found various devices on Amazon that target this use case but they all have drawbacks like low resolution or excessive manual work. Has anyone done this with their family's old photos?

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1. tomjen3 ◴[27 Jul 24 11:52 UTC] No.41085963[source]▶
I got a super default Cannon scanner, which had a button that would scan everything on the plate, and if it detected an image it would save it as such, if more than one it would cut them up in to different images, as long as there was some space between them. They would be straightened and cropped

If it disagreed with you, too bad, but it was pretty good for 99% of cases. For some reason this was a windows only thing though.

When I scanned my last pictures I brought a portable one and handfed them. It is actually not too bad, so long as the pictures are relevant to you, because nostalgia sets in.

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2. JKCalhoun ◴[27 Jul 24 12:33 UTC] No.41086168[source]▶
Apple's Image Capture seems to have a feature like that — where it autodetects the images — but I never use it.