[Leica] Re: Advice needed

[Clive at moss.net (Clive Moss)]

Wow - I started on my collection of negatives several years ago - and
made almost no progress. Your time of 6 minutes per scan seems close
to mine - but it took you 250 8 hour days to scan 20,000 images! I
have a hard time scanning for an hour at a time - my ADD kicks in
really quickly :-(

To address some of your questions:

1) Store them on hard drives - with at least one back-up, preferably
off-site in a bank vault. Make sure the backup is read occasionally to
be sure that the drive still works.
2) I don't use iPhote - but my Lightroom catalog has 85,000 images
with good performance.

--
Clive
http://clive.moss.net/blog



On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Lawrence Zeitlin
<lrzeitlin@optonline.net> wrote:
> Advice needed!
>
> I am in the middle of the process of digitizing 60 years of personal
> pictures. So far I have digitized about 20,000 negatives and slides, stored
> as JPEGs, into 100 GB of disc storage. It has taken over a year of sporadic
> work and has worn our one high end scanner, a Minolta DiMage 5400. Using
> ICE, each image takes about 6 minutes to digitize. My wife is collecting 
> the
> best prints to put in albums.
>
> Here are my questions:
>
> 1. What is the best way to store the digital files. I estimate that by the
> time I finish, I will have 200 GB, maybe much more. I started using CDs
> until I saw how many I was collecting, migrated to DVDs, and now am simply
> using hard discs.
>
> 2. Based on information from Apple, I created iPhoto Libraries to keep 
> track
> of the images. Apple maintains that iPhoto can handle 250,000 images. That
> seems a lot. Has anyone tried stuffing that many images into an iPhoto
> library? Are there any good alternatives? Remember, these are not
> professional photographs and the program will have to be used for viewing
> images as well as cataloging them.
>
> 3. What do you do with the scanned negatives and slides? Bury them? Store
> them in archival sheets? It is improbable that the negatives will ever be
> needed again, but there is always the chance. I suspect that the digital
> files will last longer than the original color film images since I noted
> considerable deterioration in the older Ektachrome and Fujichrome slides.
>
> I learned three things during the scanning process:
>
> 1. Edit before you scan. It is amazing how many duplicates or near 
> duplicate
> images are in the collection. Cutting a roll of 36 exposures down to the
> best 10 or so saves two hours of scanning time per roll.
>
> 2. Don't scan everything at the highest resolution. A lot of personal
> pictures, while interesting, will never justify enlarging beyond 4" x 6".
> High resolution scanning takes at least twice as long.
>
> 3. Keep careful records of each set of images, preferably when the pictures
> were first taken. The only way I could date some files was by estimating 
> the
> age of my children shown in the pictures. I probably was off by two or 
> three
> years. If you travel a lot, locations are hard to remember too.
>
> Help.
>
> Larry Z
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>