Okay so the first part of the “Family Photo Archive Project” is complete.
I spent the weekend scanning in a few hundred photo’s that Mum had handed me in a biscuit tin. The first thing I wanted to do was confirm how this was all going to work and I must say my plan worked very well. Firstly I scanned through all the photo’s with a glass of wine and sorted them into groups. Once this was done I started to lay them out on the scanner one at a time, and time how long it took. Well from beginning to end it took about 3 minutes to scan the picture, open it in PixelMator, make sure it was the right way up, and then save it to a known location.
Now given the number of photo’s this was going to take a long time so I had to find a few short cuts. Through trial and error I found that I could put multiple pictures on the scanner and the scanner software and PixelMator managed to tell that their were multiple photo’s rather than a collage. This significantly increased the throughput as I was now able to handle four pictures in 3 minutes. After a while, as I got used to the key presses and shortcuts this came down to about a minute and a half for four pictures, or about 22.5 seconds per picture.
Now the first run didn’t include any tidying up of the photo’s other than rotating them so they were the right way up. The next thing I will be doing is playing with PixelMator and iPhoto 09 to try and enhance the older photo’s and tidy up any inconsistencies that have crept in.
In the mean time you can find the first batch of photo’s by clicking here. What I would ask is if you have any information about who anyone is or where a picture was taken then can you post it as a comment to the photo.
