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[Sparklehorse]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Hello interweb friends,

I'll be seeing a lot of family at a memorial service in a few weeks, and I would like to bring a scanner, collect family photographs, digitize them, and put them in a Dropbox folder for everyone to have. Help me with the digitizing part -- does anyone know about how to do this well?

I've worked on a similar project with my family in the past few years. I have a portable scanner that doesn't need to be attached to a computer when scanning documents and photos. I used that for most loose photos. I also have an ancient 4-in-1 printer that I've used to scan album pages. For these and also album pages scanned by other family members, I used PhotoShop to break them apart and do some light editing. The editing has primarily been enlarging and taking sepia cast off older photos but it's also been useful to fix certain problems. The enlargement has been a valuable tool because my family has a decent number of photographs from the 20s and 30s that are essentially contact prints. So the print is tiny (like 1"x2") but there is a lot of detail in them. The PhotoShop steps can be quite time consuming but YMMV and I find it to be one of the more enjoyable way to spend hours looking at a computer screen.