As part of cleaning over Family Day weekend, I pulled out a box of old photo albums. Of course, I then proceeded to the task of digitizing them through scanning. It’s a long and tedious process, I scan about 3 photos and then I am fed up with the process.

This is not the first time I’ve done this, I’ve gone through 2 albums in the past and scanned everything. My workflow is usually to put 3 or 4 on a flatbed scanner, scan them, and then crop them into individual pictures. This time I did a bit of research beforehand and there aren’t really many tools to make this easier! The best is to use Photoshop’s capability to “crop & straighten” photos. It sometimes work. Sometimes it doesn’t straighten the photos, sometimes it cuts a photo into two pieces, sometimes it doesn’t detect any photos. It turns out that the function works better if you put your photos crookedly on the scanner, although then if it doesn’t pick up the photos then you’ll have to straighten them and scan them again!

The reason I’m willing to put time into this task is that it is great to see photos from 20 years ago, and it’s especially neat to see photos of my parents before I was born. But now, with digital cameras so prevalent, will our next generation have the same experience? Our lives are recorded and digitized through Facebook and blogs.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: growingup, photoshop