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Scanning Large Amounts of Pictures?

Posted by Cliff on from the helpful-tips-for-a-tedious-process dept.

ClintJCL asks: "My wife & I are involved in scanning every photo I've ever taken in my life. She can lay down 4 or 5 pictures into the flatbed scanner at once, thereby saving the scanning time which is the bottleneck. But then she has to split them with Photoshop, which is also somewhat time-consuming. I've searched on the net for hours for a piece of software that would automatically split these 'Batch image scans' into single images and it just doesn't seem to exist. There are plenty of pieces of software to split a single image arbitrarily into sections for the purpose of loading faster on an HTML page (which I disagree with anyway and is not what I'm looking for). But -nothing- that seems to do any sort of edge-detection to determine what pictures exist in a given 'scan batch'. I'm out of resources. I've nowhere else to go. Perhaps someone can clue me in on a piece of software that can do this for me."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. The scanner driver itself by Evro · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's been quite a while since I scanned anything, but I remember that with whatever scanner I was using at the time, in Photoshop you would do file->acquire->twain and it would bring up the scanning program. This program scanned the image lightly as a preview, and then let you select however many "jobs" you wanted at once, so you could select 1 square as job 1, another as job 2, another as job 3. Then it would make one pass and generate an image for each job.

    As I said, this was a while ago and I don't remember the scanner, but it was probably some UMAX. The name "Mira scanner" stands out in my mind as the scanning software. You scanner may have this capability also; poke around a bit.

    --
    rooooar
  2. umax magic scan.. Your scanning Prints???? by acomj · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have a higher end scanner (powerlook 3000) It allows you to do multiple scans in one pass.
    ie you preview
    you box all the pictures
    you click scan

    you can adjust each box color/exposure separate.
    it scans each image as a separate file. Of course you have to preview each image which takes times.

    You could write some software to do it. It might help to use a background matt of a consistant color though.

    I think you really should consider scaning only images you care about and adjusting each one individually. If you really care about your images get a negative scanner. Scanning negatives is far far fat better than scanning prints.

  3. You Have Everything You Need by edthemonkey · · Score: 3, Informative

    Photoshop should be just fine for what you want to do.

    There should be a pallete around that lets you create actions. You basically hit the record button and go through the steps you want to do. Map that to a keystroke and voila.

    When selecting the picture, you could even used a fixed width box, so all of the pictures will have the same dimensions. For the action, you could have it copy what you've selected, create a new image and paste the selection into it. Then have it merge layers and auto-adjust the levels/contrast and then have it bring up the save dialog box.

    All you're really left doing is scanning the set of pictures, clicking the mouse once (for the fixed width box), hitting the keystroke and then typing in the name of the file.