Digitizing mass quantities of photos

Question

I have a couple thousand 4x6 photos (I also have the corresponding negatives) that I want to digitize, organize in iPhoto and eventually archive to DVD. I have a flatbed scanner, but scanning the photos is slow and tedious (rotate, crop, adjust levels, etc...) and does not yield very high quality results (at least my scanner doesn't). I'm interested in hearing from others that have experience digitizing a mass quantity of photos and how it was best accomplished. Thank you in advance for your replies.

Answer 1

If you have the negatives you will get _much_ better results from scanning them. There is more "infomation" on the negative. Paper does not contain the range of tones and the printing process introduces some optical blurring.
Assuming the camera you used was just "decent" (Not an SLR on a tripod) then your negatives might have 40 to 50 lines per milimeter of resolation. The 35mm frame size is 36x24. You would want to scan them at 3600x2400 at least. this means
8.6 megapxel scans or 2400 DPI optical resolution scanner.
If you were a very carful photographer, using good equipment and technique you might have up to 80 or more lines per mm on your negs. but half that is more typical of a hand help point and shoot 35mm camera. You would want an 18MB scan to capture all the information on a good 35mm negative and 1/2 the scan file size for a frame shot with a small "point and shot" camera.
So you have some options
1) Put up with poor quality scans. By "poor" I mean that the scan does not capture all of the image quality that is
in the negative. But this is OK if you don't need large prints and mainly look at photos on a monitor
2) Buy a scanner that can scan negative with at least
12-bits per color chanel and 2400 DPI native resoluion
or 4800 DPI if you have better quality negatives.
3) Pay someone a couple bucks per image to to the work for you.
The cost difference between #2 and #3 depends on the number of images. The breakeven might happen at about 1,000 images. Good negative scanners cost well over $1K.
When doing scans you always need to look at the final product. Are you going to "adjust" the images with Photoshop and make 8x10 prints? If so you will need a full 18MB scan from the negative. Or you going to show there on a monitor? if so a 200DPI scan of the print is good enough.
The next question is: "Is iPhoto the right tool for organizing thousands of images?" 2,000 imaes at 10MB each means 200GB of data. I'd prefer to keep that much data organized into some kind of folder strucure and iPhoto does not allw that.