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Digitized photos and videos can last virtually forever.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
Getting photos and slides into digital form
March 7, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
Reader Dan Korte of Cicero sent in some questions many others have asked: What's the best way to get your old family photographs and slides into a form that can be stored, displayed and shared on computers? How should you go about converting slides to computer form? What about old VHS tapes?
"My parents," Korte wrote, "have boxes and boxes of family photographs at their home that I'd love to digitize and preserve. Most are plain old 4-inch by 6-inch pictures both in albums and loose, but they also have lots of slides and negatives and many video tapes and 8 mm reel-to-reel home movies. I would love to spend some time preserving these memories, using my home computer to burn DVDs to share with family members. I'm comfortable with the technical end of processing the images and video, but what is the best method you've found for the average consumer to convert these various media?"
Korte added: "I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on this project, but I need to be sure the scans are of an acceptable resolution level to allow for printing. I've seen the USB Instant DVD, and Dazzle makes a similar product for video productions, but what recommendations do you have for mass photo/slide/negative scanning projects?"
This kind of project obviously isn't a Saturday afternoon job. Scanning a few hundred photos and then editing them for proper reproduction would take a few weeks of evening and weekend work; add the other conversions and you can readily see how such an undertaking could easily take up an entire year of free time.
So take a deep breath and be honest with yourself before you start such a project. Count the photos, slides and negatives separately. They're become digital photos. Add up all the video tapes you'd like to convert. They'll become video DVDs. 8 mm movies probably ought to be taken to a shop that specializes in video transfers, but you can convert them to VHS tape and then to DVDs yourself with a little practice -- as long as you have a working 8 mm projector.
I don't want to discourage you from taking on a family archiving project. Digitized photos and videos can last virtually forever, and your family's descendants will have a record of their family's history they would not have had otherwise.
This week we'll see what's involved in turning old photos, negatives and slides into digital form. Next week we'll tackle what for many users is a more difficult task -- converting old home movies and video tapes into DVDs.
1. Scanning photos. You need a flatbed scanner, the kind with a lid and a glass surface. Many brand-name scanners are actually made by the same original-equipment manufacturer, so the brand is less important than it seems. Make sure the scanner you choose works with your operating system. (Ask at the store before you buy, and immediately return it for a refund if it won't work with your version of Windows or your Macintosh operating system.) Scan at 300 dots per inch. (Going higher usually doesn't pay off for family archives.)
2. Scanning slides and negatives. You can sometimes get away with using a dual-purpose scanner (one that does both photos and slides), but for technical reasons this is not a good idea. Buy a separate slide and negative scanner instead. Prices start at about $160. Scan at 1,800 dots per inch or higher, but don't exceed the optical dots-per-inch rating of your scanner. (If it has more than one number in the rating, the low one is the optical rating.)
3. Software. Don't waste time with bad software. All the software that comes free with scanners is suspect. (They give it away, and that should be telling you something.) Get Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 ($50 with a rebate, $80 otherwise). Nothing else works as well. (Both the Windows version and the Mac version come in the same box, on the same installation CD.) Every scan will need to be touched up in your software. Make sure you set aside time to edit you images after they're scanned.
4. Computer power. You don't need the newest and fanciest Windows PC or Apple Macintosh for scanning and editing. Any Windows PC, Apple Mac or Linux PC made in the last three or four years should be fine, and most older computers will be OK, too. But your computer needs a lot of free disk space and a fair amount of memory. Your main disk drive ought to have 800 megabytes of free space as a no-nonsense minimum for scanning small photos. Better yet would be 3 or 4 gigabytes of free space as a minimum. (Large drives are cheap, but check with the manufacturer of your computer or with knowledgeable store personnel before buying a new drive if you have a computer that's more than two years old. Older computers usually can't handle monster drives.)
Next: Getting old videos onto DVDs and video CDs.
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