As my friends are probably aware, I have been embarked on a monster scanning project intended to digitize all the family photos. In our family, that is a lot of photos. As of today, I have finished 214 rolls which includes 5317 frames. That is a lot! It is also tons of fun because I get to remember what was happening and see what everybody looked like at the time. Anyway, the point of today's post is a brief explanation of the work flow.

Organization is the key to success. There are two aspects to that. First is organization of the physical photos and second is labeling and organizing the digital images. In the first case, I am lucky to be married to Ginny. Over the years she has kept the photo envelopes organized by date and she has written dates and notes on the envelopes. That makes life easier. I would never be able to take a group of photos and figure out when and where.

In the second part, Each envelope is assigned a certain reference number based on the date. I write that on the envelope and highlight it with orange marker. That makes it easy to spot the ones that have been done. For each individual frame I assign a filename that is of the form YYMMDD_XXXX where the XXXX is a sequence number. I scan in the order of the sequence of the frames so a little chronological order is introduced. Finally, I assign a metadata date that matches the date on the folder of pictures.

Now it is off to the scanner. I use a Nikon Coolscan 9000. It is pretty good. I also use Ed Hamrick's Vuescan software. Since Nikon discontinued the scanner, they have put nothing into to support, so their software isn't really conpatible with Windows versions after XP. I have had good luck with Vuescan, although it is a bit quirky. I end up with a 2000 dpi scan which gives a 10 meg TIFF file size. The last step is pulling the photos into Lightroom and assigning keywords. This part is very important. I started with Lightroom quite a while ago based on some correspondence with Dave Beedon. You may remember that he is pretty compulsive about keeping records of his photographs. I have been keywording all along even before I got Lightroom, so things were pretty smooth when I started using it.

This is going to be a long project. I can't even estimate how many rolls are waiting to be scanned. Bottom line, I am thankful that we were shutterbugs all along.