Preserving My Childhood Memories Digitally 

Last Christmas, I took a crate of old photos and photo albums out of my mom's basement, thinking that I would scan them. Having a digital copy (and being able to backup those digital copies) would be a great thing, especially as my brothers and I are getting older. It'd be nice to be able to show my nieces and nephew these pictures, or show them to Katie so she can see what I looked like growing up.

Well, that was a good goal, at least.

It's been a bit more challenging than I anticipated, for a few reasons. First, it was pretty time-consuming just going through the photos: trying to figure out what year the photo was from, sometimes figuring out who it was (my brothers look similar at 1 and 2), and filtering out the duplicates. It took me a few weeks, off and on, to get through all the photos. (And, of course, it took me a few months to get started on that effort, at all.)

I've got a flatbed scanner, which is probably the preferred scanner for scanning photos, but doesn't exactly make for expeditious scanning. Well, not when combined with using Preview or Image Capture. You load a few images on the scanner, choose "Detect Separate Items" so that—ideally—you can easily scan more than one photo at at a time, pick your settings (color, 300 dpi, PNG), and scan away.

Most of the time, it goes fine. But, frequently enough to be annoying, the software doesn't do a great job to detect the photos, so you have to fiddle with bounding box to crop the image right. Then make sure to name the images so you'll recognize what they are (if you plan to put them into categories in some fashion).

It's just not as fast as I'd hoped, but I'm working on scanning a handful of photos every weekend (and when I've got free time), and I expect that I'll be done in a couple of months.

One handy tool I'd recommend that you use is ImageOptim. If you're scanning to PNG (and you should be), it'll do some really smart stuff to the image to remove about 20% of the overall size without impacting the image quality. If you're going to be scanning hundreds (or thousands) of photos, that'll come in handy.

I'm sure someone's got a better workflow. If you do, I'd love to hear it. There are companies out there that'll do this for you, but it seems to be a bit expensive. I figure free with some effort is better than paying a big chunk of money for someone to do it for me. But, I'm betting there's some smart software or tips that will make the process go faster. (Maybe you have one?)