Digitising Photographs

[Robert]

Hello

I have a lot of photos taken with ol' trusty Canon EOS SLR from way back when. I would now like to digitise them and save them to DVDs/CDs. The photos were all printed in 3R and 4R sizes, with the date shown.

(1) With my Epson scanner, what resolution should I choose? It has from 50dpi right up to 9600dpi.

(2) After scanning, I would like to re-date the date-stamp of the file to be that of the date of photo taken. What utility would you recommend?

(3) Any other things you'd recommend, or did I forget to ask or pay special attention to?

TIA

Robert

 

[Robert]

Any suggestions?

 

[romeobravo]

pass it to the photo labs. Save your time

 

[EOS500N]

seriously i'm not sure whether u'll be satisifed with the scan quality of a normal scanner. more often than not its way below the standard.

bottomline, u'll b better off going 2 the lab.

 

[LittleWolf]

what resolution should I choose?

I would like to re-date the date-stamp of the file to be that of the date of photo taken. What utility would you recommend?

Any other things you'd recommend, or did I forget to ask or pay special attention to?

The resolution might depend very much on the prints. Traditional black/white prints can hold a lot of detail, whereas modern colour machine prints are often quite fuzzy, partly due to limitations of the paper, and often also due to low resolution scans/exposures of digital minilabs. Try it out, but I doubt you'll get much more detail by going beyond 300 dpi or even less than that.

Scanning the negatives will likely result in much better quality, with respect to both resolution and colour/tonal range reproduction.

I don't know what operating system you're using - under Linux, you could use "touch" to modify file creation dates. A much more robust solution would be, however, to embed EXIF-style information into the picture file. EXIF also provides separate fields for the date the picture was taken, and the date when it was digitised.

As mentioned by others, consider commercial scanning services if you have more than a few pictures. Doing it yourself will take a lot of time and effort.