Another fifty pictures scanned and ten thousand to go…where did I leave off?
Saturday, 19 February 2011
I have tons of old photos that I am always in the process of scanning in. Some are pictures from childhood, others are from my time in the Navy, and still others are from family life before digital photography (somewhere around the end of 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1).
I have been struggling with making everything digital for years now, and there are stacks of photos and thick albums that remain uncharted territory. Every once in awhile I sit down and scan in an album.
Trouble is, unless you do the whole job at once, it’s pretty easy to lose track of where you have already been. And if that’s not bad enough, we always bought double prints—they didn’t cost much more, and we could give some away. Now how do I know if I have scanned the long-lost twins of some photos that are already on my computer? That’s a problem for another day.
Here’s how I make sure I don’t scan the same single photo twice:
That’s right, I leave breadcrumbs in the form of little dots on the back of each one.
Such a simple thing, but it saves me from a lot of head scratching and wasted time scanning the same stuff over and over.
No. 1 — February 20th, 2011 at 9:48 am
I like this idea better than my way of keeping imported pictures in a separate pile. You can pic out any picture you like, scan it, then put it back in the respective collection or album.
No. 2 — February 21st, 2011 at 11:49 pm
See, my problem is that I put the imported pictures in a separate pile, and then I put that pile in a box for six months
One added benefit of the Sharpie method is that I seem to use whatever color I have on hand at the time, so I can easily spot what era photos were scanned in.
There are some that I scanned using an auto feeder some years ago, and it wasn’t until later that I noticed how much dust those scans had. I can easily find the offending snapshots for re-scan by looking for silver dots (the color I used at the time).