BetterPhoto Q&A
Category: New Answers

transferring old photos to CDs

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December 31, 2006

I have not read anything since about this, though - I think I read of it in PDN magazine but perhaps others know more about it.

Anyway, the point is that the ability to scan more than one at a time relates more to the hardware (the scanner, and how it can handle paper) than hte software. Now, of course, you could perhaps lay 4 pictures down on the glass and scann them together, but thie then requires you go into software to separate he images and save them as different files. I don't believe there is software designed to automate that process - even though some scanners that handle film allow you to scan a strip of 35MM film and the scanner software will "figure out" where the actual frames are and samve them separately.

So,one-by-one may be the only viable way (unless Kodak's test was successful).

As for burining them to CD or DVD, yes, it's generally considered true that most cheap optical disks have a relatively short lifespan to to oxidation of the dye layer when it gets exposed to air through micro-cracks in the plastic laminate. But the good news is that you can now buy "archival" optical disks that use gold rather than phenolyn dyes - the gold does not deteriorate so the disks are rated to 100 or 300 years of life!

Of course, the OTHEr issue with optical disks is, if you were to pull one out of storage in, say, 20 years, even if it has not dissolved into becoming a coaster you most likely would not be able to find a reader. Think of the notion of trying to find a disk drive today that will read 8 inch floppies. NASA has actually lost gobs of data that are on really old open-reel data tapes, where there are no more machines to read the things.

So, if you're ready to spend yet more time and effort, you might want to consider storing those scanned images on both an external magnetic hard disk drive and optical media (the archival stuff, of course). At least you whould always be able to connect the 500GB drive of today to some computer 5 generations down the line, and re-record the whole thing to the 4 petabyte drives that will be common then.

Oh, and one final thought (aren't you glad you asked?) - what resolution you want to scan the photos at will depend on what you may eventually want to do with the images. That is, if you think you might ever want to print any of them, you should scan at 300dpi. But, if you are absolutely certain that you only will show the pictures on websites, as e-mail attachments, etc (basically, that you will only display them to computer monitors) then you could get away with 72dpi or 150 dpi and thereby save a ton of file space (72dpi scans are 1/16th the size of 300dpi scans). But 72dpi makes for lousy hard copy prints, so you have to consider the possiblity that you might want to make a print from a file in the future.

Hope that helps...

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January 01, 2007

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February 12, 2007

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February 12, 2007