this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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[–] tomiant@piefed.social 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

My brother in Christ, please tell me what hardware you used and method. I have around 20K print photos that need digitizing and short of paying out of the wazoo for a professional service to do it, I'm at a total loss

[–] limelight79@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I have an Epson scanner, though I'd have to check the exact model. The one I have has the light so I can scan negatives or prints, but if you're only doing prints you wouldn't need that feature.

I used Vuescan to do it. Paid software, but none of the open source options were as smooth for high volume scanning (this was some years ago, so that might have changed). Vuescan did a pretty good job of adjusting colors and all automatically after the scan. It was worth the money for the time savings alone.

Basically just sit there, load the print, hit scan, wait, remove the print, repeat. You'll learn the sound of the scanner when it's returning to the top of the glass, at which point the print is safe to remove even if the software is still processing. That saves a little time.

It's tedious, no question. Scanning negatives is better because you can get up to six in one shot. Get a second negative holder and you can have one scanning while you're setting up the other one. It took me months and months.

Also consider culling the pictures you scan. Did I need to scan all of those rolls of the bridge construction? Nah.

Edit - your comment has me thinking, I need work in winter time. Maybe this could be a side job...

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 1 points 8 hours ago

Holy shit. You crazy motherfucker. You actually put the photos on the frame one by one? And scanned them one by one?

I gotta say...

You may be insane, but you get the job done, as opposed to me, who am still trying to figure out the best way to do it.

That's why we are still trying to understand how they built the pyramids, while the pyramid builders simply did it.