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To Digitize or Not Digitize the Family Photo Album?
animys asks: "In the last few years, we have begun to witness the inevitable shift from 35mm cameras to high resolution, cheap, consumer oriented digital cameras; with this, the move away from a tangible photo album has also ensued. This change has obviously left many families with huge amounts of developed pictures and albums. For reasons of preservation and usability, some families would like to convert their previously taken pictures to a digital medium - yet many have hundreds or even thousands of pictures. What type of tools can the DIY'er use to make this process easier? Beyond the obvious scanner and graphics package, is there any good quality software that can augment this arduous and possibly over-daunting task?" What about folks looking to do the opposite? Most people take decent care of their albums, and the pictures are always viewable regardless of the changes in technology. What options are there for those folks looking to make near-picture-quality hardcopies of their digital photos for inclusion in their albums?
I'll chime in and say that on the Mac, iPhoto is really a killer tool for organizing photos.
and the picture books that you can create with it are nothing short of impressive. handing one of those out to my cousin from the picture i took at here wedding as really impressive.
(pretend there's something witty here)
I'd like to see a worldwide snapshot database combined with post-911-level pattern recognition routines.
Upload your grandmother's album and find out: Who is that standing there at the beach with Dad and Aunt Edna in 1952? The database project would be able to figure it out.
What a boon for genealogists.
(And, yes, a problem for people with something to hide about what they were doing in 1952 or who their ancestor was in 1876. But it's going to be a transparent society anyway, and we're going to have to get used to it.)
On physical longevity, here's some info based on testing by the manufacturers:
Well, great. Of course we have some photos in our family collection that are 120 years old, and could still make prints from the negatives. Are you sure the CDs will last that long?File format longevity is the real killer, though. I have quite a few 5.25" floppy disks with documents that were created in industry-leading formats in the mid-1980s. I would like to retrieve some of them, but I (a) haven't seen a 5.25" floppy drive in years (b) can't find any software that will read those formats. And that is only 17 years! Do you really trust your family's history to the idea that JPEGs, for example, will still be readable in 2102?
sPh
Have you used any of the newer ink jets? I use a Epson Photo Stylus 870 with glossy inkjet paper to print snapshots from our Canon G1 and I have been quite happy with the results. If you consider that I take lots of pictures and then print out only the best ones the cost for ink and paper comes out cheaper than a roll of 35mm film and developing for the whole roll to get maybe 10-15 nice prints (smaller too).
Unless your doing fine art photography a good ink jet should be more than sufficient and quite economical. Personally I still don't feel digital photography is ready for fine art shooting. That aside I'm considering adding the new Nikon D100 body to my arsenal to compliment my N90s, N70 and 6006.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
My local photo shop which is also the best one in the city can print from any digital source. They have the technilogy to do it. You can also have photos printed from the web. Upload your images and have them mailed to you.
In fact, they've switched to digital in the lab. If you develop a 35mm roll, thye will scan it and print from the scanned images using their digital enlarger. The result, using a good 3.1 megapixel camera is indiscernible from traditionnal pictures for sizes up to 8x10.
Have a great 3 day week-end for the other fols up there. And the store is LLLozeau in Montreal, QC.
JP
--- Worst tagline ever.
For high end, the Phaser series that Xerox acquired from Tektronix were always the best (but look out on the supplies costs). More info can be found here -> http://www.officeprinting.xerox.com/perl-bin/produ ct.pl?mode=color.
For the consumer, I find the HP 11** series to be the best for most folks. A nice twist here is the ability to insert camera media (CF and SM) directly into the printer and print from there. More info here -> http://products.hp-at-home.com/products/category.p hp?high_level_category_id=2&category_id=1
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
you can...
instead of img003.jpg
summer 1965 grandpaw-timmy-danny-and the boat at frelling lake.jpg
Works great and work on any modern operating system incluging windows.
makes sorting easy, and you dont need anything special to read the tags.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I waited years to buy a digital camera. I wanted a digital camera that took pictures as good quality (or better) as 35mm. The Canon D30 is the first digital camera that has received critical acclaim for its ability to take photos which surpass the quality of 35mm cameras. So I bought one of these cameras and a nice 28-135mm lens and entered the digital realm. I also bought a 1GB IBM microdrive for the camera which holds about 800 photos. This camera takes absolutely fantastic photos. I use a very inexpensive inkjet printer, the Canon BJC-8200 to print photos on glossy photo paper and visitors to my home are astounded when I tell them that all the photos hung around my home were taken with a digital camera and printed on an inkjet printer. They look at least as good as traditional photos.
There are several advantages to digital photos over 35mm:
1. Since my microdrive holds 800 photos and each digital photo has no real cost to me (besides a small amount of battery power), I will often take several photos of the same subject / scene whereas with a 35mm I might only take one photo because of the cost of film.
2. Before printing a digital photo, you have the opportunity to crop, enhance and edit it. While you can certainly crop, enhance and even edit 35mm photos, it takes far less time and money to do so with digital. I use Adobe Photoshop for this purpose. Besides providing tools to do simple enhancements, Photoshop also has many built-in filters (and more available third-party) which are a lot of fun to play with.
3. Digitial albums are extremely easy to organize. I use directories to create albums. I create a new folder under the "My Photos" folder for each new event. I use the naming convention "YYYY-MM-DD Event Name" for each subfolder, so it's easy to browse the albums in chronological order.
4. Digital photos are far more permanent than prints. Formats may change over time, but you'll always be able to convert to the new formats. The key is to keep copies of both the original photos AND the ones you've spent the time editing. I backup all my photos onto CD. While you only have one copy of a 35mm negative, you can easily create as many copis of your photos CDs as you like and share these with friends and family members or just store them for safekeeping.
5. Digital photos are much easier to share. I live a great distance from the rest of my family and use my photos to help stay in touch. When I first got my digital camera, I kept my online photos at zing.com. Unfortunately, they went the way of the dodo about a year ago. They made a deal with ophoto.com before unplugging and all my albums were transferred, but I didn't like ophoto's interface all that much and eventually found a new home for my photos at ImageStation. It's a free service and it's owned by Sony, so hopefully it will prove to have some staying power. If you're interested, please visit my photos. I have over a hundred albums online - I think this one is the best.
I also started digitizing my older 35mm and APS photos using a film scanner. A film scanner produces far better quality digital photos than a flatbed scanner does, so consider investing in one if you want to digitize / preserve your old photos. I can recommend the Canon CanoScan FS 2710 that I bought. It was inexpensive and besides producing much higher quality photos than a flatbed scanner, it's also a lot faster!
I have a CD-RW (two of them actually, one in a fire proof box), when I pull pictures off the camera I create a new directory labeled for the date.
Then I use a freeware version of Ulead Photoexplorer to print a copy of every picture in that directory in a 2 by 2 format.
I print the directory name (the date) at the top of the sheet and the filename under each picture.
Then I slide the sheet into a sheet protector and put it into a three ring binder.
Works great, is very portable and if my technology illiterate grandmother wants a copy I know exactly where on the CD (kept in the back of the binder) to print a new copy.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Advantages - everyone has a copy of all the photographs, and digital images won't degrade. I'd strongly recommend it. And yes, provided oyu've got the negatives, negative scanners are better.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
It would be nice if every 5-10 years NIST or the Smithsonian would accept a standard that would always be accessible in the future. That is, the government would fund the continued existence of a select few outdated digital technologies in the interest of being able to archive data on that technology (and have it always readable).
This would come at some cost, but then everyone would know what to format use if they want to save something for the great great grandchildren.
"...saying that sofware written FOR Windows is usually lame is a bit fanatical."
No, that's simply my experience. I've found that WinDOZE software usually is lame, especially when it comes to TWAIN drivers. Of the seven or eight TWAIN drivers I've used over the years, the Nikon driver is the first to offer the ability to auto-number files according to a user-provided pattern. Hell, it's the first to even remember its settings from one use to the next. I have an HP flatbed scanner sitting on my desk. When I use my TWAIN driver, I have to click off the scan settings every time the driver comes up. It's a small thing, but it makes using the scanner more difficult than it needs to be. (And that's when it's not crashing or locking up the calling applicatien.) It's lame software.
My experience with general-purpose software is that Macintosh software is usually the easiest to use. It's a cliche, but it's true. Unix/linux software generally provides the klunkiest UIs, but almost always provides a way to drop down into script mode so I can program whatever is missing from the UI. That's why I use my HP flatbed scanner with linux and scanimage. Finally, I find that WinDOZE software generally is the most awkward to use because you're locked into the poor UI. Want to do something the UI designer hadn't thought of? Too bad, you're almost always out of luck.
Finding a TWAIN scanner driver that makes the job of scanning and archiving photos so easy was a startling experience. I expected the Nikon scanner driver to be pure crap, like most TWAIN drivers. It's not only better than most TWAIN drivers, it's also better than most winDOZE software. It's actually very impressive. But maybe I just have higher expectations than you do.
Oh, and I call it "Windoze" not to be clever, but to express my utter contempt for it. I don't give a shit what you think of that.
--Jim