I used to think I knew a lot about scanning pictures. After all, I’ve used, sold, and trained people on scanners for over 15 years. But a couple months ago my wife pointed to a 32”x18”by18” chest that held ALL of the family’s photos and said “wouldn’t it be nice to have all of our pictures on computer so we could show them on the TV and use them on our Smartphone’s? Besides, if we had a fire or something, what would we do?” I was thinking this was going to be one of those “nice ideas” that never happened. But then she said “wouldn’t it be nice to show them to the kids when they visit over the holidays?” Whelp, she “suggested” a deadline, and I hate to disappoint her, so I put together a plan and went to work.

The scanner I use is an HP OfficeJet 8500, part of an all-in-one printer with HP Solutions Station software. They had a less expensive one, about $50, that comes with the same software that would have worked just as good. Other brands work fine too. Just make sure the scanner is “name brand” has a good user rating, and 300 resolution, cause that is the resolution you want to use. Now I don’t have any negatives or slides to scan. But if you do, make certain your scanner is setup for them.

The pictures I scanned ran the gamut, from hi-quality 4x6 glossy pictures taken with a 35mm professional camera to 10x12 portraits, to 3x3s taken long ago with a 110 instamatic, Polaroid’s, and 1x1 pictures from a photo booth at a fair. Some of the print finishes were glossy, some were matt finished, and some hung on the wall so long that the pictures stuck to the glass. We even had some old timey black ‘n’ whites on plates.

However, 90% of them were in albums with a clear plastic sheet over them, and that made it easy. Question is, do you take them out of the album or do you scan them through the plastic? I experimented and found that if the plastic was clean and flush with the picture, I couldn’t tell the difference. So I put whole album sheets on the scanner glass and did scanned them that way.

The software was amazing. An album page might have 4, 6, 8, or more pictures on it. The software detected the edges of each picture and saved each in its own file. After scanning it would display the pictures and allow me to rotate clockwise or counter clockwise by right-clicking the image. It would also allow me to crop, take out redeye, scratches and dust.

Some of the pictures required a little more massaging. Some were badly faded or the colors turned gray, blue, or brown. I used PhotoDraw, but most drawing software will do the same thing. It allowed me to click on something in the image that should be white. Based on that selection, it would alter the colors and make it right. And most of the time, it did a great job of fixing the color.

Whilst fixing pictures, you can also crop or enlarge. Don’t overdo it. If you enlarge more than 10 or 20%, the image might get “grainy”. But many times you can turn a picture of folks in the distance into a prized portrait. You can also get rid of X son-in-laws and brother-in-laws too (hee hee).

Whelp, I got ’r’ done. 5871 pictures, about 6 gigs worth. We put them on 2 computers and 3, 8 gig memory sticks, two sticks went in the safe and the other is plugged into the BluRay so we can see them on the TV. My Wife is grinning from ear to ear. While the job was grueling, the rewards were more than expected, in that whilst scanning, I remembered so many things that I should never have forgotten about people and progress, and what brought us to where we are today. Truly a rewarding (but not to be repeated) experience. My advice, get started, stay at it, enjoy the process, and reap the rewards.