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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."

5 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Coincidence by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was asked just yesterday to find something very much like this (except for some text processing and databasing thrown in). I haven't found anything out of the box that fits (not that I was smart enough to do an ask slashdot on it), so I think that I may have to code my own in the next week. Are you willing to pay a little cash for a custom solution?

  2. hardware solution? by Brewst3r · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why not get a automatic document feeder for the scanner?

  3. Scratch the itch by Smack · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Of course there are ways to do this on Windows. But it's hard to believe that no one has yet implemented it the unix way. There should be a utility where you type "picsplit *.jpg", and you get a directory of split files, sequentially numbered.

    Programmers are always looking for projects, this sounds like a relatively easy one.

  4. ImageMagick tools by austad · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ImageMagick comes with some command line utils that you can use to pull sections out of an image. Since you are scanning photos, I assume they are all the same size and have the same placement on the scanner. You could just write a script to grab 5 sections (or however many you are scanning) out of the image produced by the scanner. It won't automatically find the boundaries between each photo, but if you place them on the scanner carefully, you should be able to get consistent results.

    The NetPBM package may have similar capabilities.

    --
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  5. Scan the negatives by debugdave · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why don't you just scan the negatives? (that is if you still have them) It would be more economical than spending the next 2 years chopping up 8"x10"x150dpi.

    Just a thought.

    Dave