Downsizing Photo Albums


tara nix

New Member
In preparation for fulltiming in the future, we need to reduce our 30+ photo albums into a smaller, lighter format. Considering buying a good scanner, transferring them to our PC, then downloading them to a CD or DVD, but this sounds like a very time consuming project to me. The other alternative, having a professional do it for us, sounds very expensive.

Anyone out there have experience with this?
 

John Harrelson

New Member
Downsizing Photo Albums

Tara, I do it all the time. It's easy.

Scan all of your pictures onto the computer first. Either create a folder to put them into or as I do, scan them into the "My Pictures" section of my start menu.

After they are all on the computer, open the folder where you can see the pictures and shrink the window to half size... this way you can see the stuff behind the window where the pictures are and still see the pictures.

Now put a blank CD into the drive that is used to "Burn" a cd..

Now choose which picture you want to transfer first and "click and Drag" the picture over to the icon of the drive that the blank cd is in and "Drop" in into the cd. POOFFF ... there she be.

Just a note... when you scan the pictures into the computer, scan then in the "JPEG" format. That way you can get more pictures on the cd..

Have fun and if I can answer a question for you, drop me an email, if I know the answer I'll tell you and I don't know the answer, we'll both ask other folks here on the forums.

Have fun,

John
 

retlveit

New Member
Downsizing Photo Albums

Hi Tara

I bought a scanner on ebay for around $50.00 and scanned something like 8,000 slides in a four month period. Watching TV at night I had the laptop on my lap and the scanner on a table beside me, and fed slides into it, one every 15 seconds or so. Like John I also put them on a CD, except I didn't do them individually but by folder.

I seperated the slides into folders by years, right clicked on the folder and fed it into the CD burner. I made four sets of CD's, one for each kid and one for me. Using JPEG I got around 700 pictures onto a disc. It's amazing how a wall full of slides compressed into a 4"x8" space!
 

TEAMNIX

New Member
Downsizing Photo Albums

Thanks for the info guys...

What kind of scanners are you using, and are you happy with the quality of the photos viewed off the CD?

Tara
 

John Harrelson

New Member
Downsizing Photo Albums

Tara,
For many years I used a cheap scanner that cost about $39.99 and it worked beautifully. I now have a nice HP combo scanner/printer/copier, and it works fantastic..

You can buy one like mine for about $200.00 at places like Wal-Mart.

Of course, you can still buy the cheaper flatbed scanners for around $25 to $50 at places like Office Max, Wal-Mart, and several computer stores.. They do a pretty good job actually. We both realize that a professional photographer would not use one that cheap, but for the average person, they are great..

John
 

retlveit

New Member
Downsizing Photo Albums

The old anxiom garbage in garbage out is the rule here. You can't tweak the fuzzy out of an out of focus photo and make it sharp; I can't anyway .. and I've tried!

I bought a new HP photo smart S20 on Ebay, I think I paid around $50.00, but that was a year ago, anything past last wk I'm fuzzy on! This is more or less designed for slides, (put the slide in a little tray, it eats it, copys it, then spits it out) it will take 4x5 photos but I think the quality suffers when copying prints. Prints is when you want to use a table top scanner. It will copy negatives, but I didn't like them either.

However, I think the slide quality is superb, as John said probabley not up to pro standards, but plenty good enough for me. I have blown faces up and printed them w/negible loss of sharpness.

If your curious put "HP photo smart S20" on Ebay's search engine and see what pops up, or just put it on google, jeeves, yahoo, etc. and see what pops up.

Wow! I just followed my own advice and see its listed for $499.00 at the Kelkoo site ... I know I didn't pay that much, maybe a hundred, but I don't think so.

Good luck.
 

retlveit

New Member
Downsizing Photo Albums

The old anxiom garbage in garbage out is the rule here. You can't tweak the fuzzy out of an out of focus photo and make it sharp; I can't anyway .. and I've tried!

I bought a new HP photo smart S20 on Ebay, I think I paid around $50.00, but that was a year ago, anything past last wk I'm fuzzy on! This is more or less designed for slides, (put the slide in a little tray, it eats it, copys it, then spits it out) it will take 4x5 photos but I think the quality suffers when copying prints. Prints is when you want to use a table top scanner. It will copy negatives, but I didn't like them either.

However, I think the slide quality is superb, as John said probabley not up to pro standards, but plenty good enough for me. I have blown faces up and printed them w/negible loss of sharpness.

If your curious put "HP photo smart S20" on Ebay's search engine and see what pops up, or just put it on google, jeeves, yahoo, etc. and see what pops up.

Wow! I just followed my own advice and see its listed for $499.00 at the Kelkoo site ... I know I didn't pay that much, maybe a hundred, but I don't think so.

Good luck.
 

cw

New Member
Downsizing Photo Albums

if you have some older negiitives not only 35 mm however these can be do also and want so good copys those 30s and 20 negitives get a microtex scanmaker 5900 works on all negitives cost arround 160.00 but worth it i even copied some 8mm film came out snowy but so did the orginial prints.
 
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