Friday, May 07, 2010

ScanSnap 3 - Photos

I put nearly 200 photos through the ScanSnap in less than an hour while I was talking on the phone the other morning. It pretty much does everything for you. I feed them through individually after sorting a bit by size. It seems to work best if the guides are adjusted to the size of the picture but after the first couple that is pretty mindless. It scanned both sides if there was anything on the back at all. Some of the photos I put through are least 80 years old.

In some cases it assigned a number to the scanned pictures which would indicate the front and back are together and in some cases it didn't. I didn't feel it necessary to spend time trying to figure that out.

I have no idea how many pictures I have. There are more in that box and I have two additional larger boxes. I easily have 2,000 more. It won't happen overnight but I am now confident I will get them done. It's much easier and faster with the ScanSnap than the flatbed scanner I was trying to use [which is perfect for stacks of single sided pages and does legal size] and does not require as much of my attention.

After the pictures are scanned I spend time renaming them with names to indicate who is in the picture. Those that I have no idea or not enough information keep their scanner assigned number which makes them stand out as unidentified. It is easy to work with them in the ScanSnap Organizer although you don't have to use it.

All my pictures are saved to a 1 TB NAS drive, that is a large drive attached to my router and available from any computer [or iPod or SmartPhone] on my network. There Picasa automatically begins working on the face recognition. Read about that here. It does some amazing things, sometimes telling me who is in the unknown pictures.

2 comments:

A rootdigger said...

It looks pretty nice, I googled it. So the copy looks good compared to other. My scanner allows me to play with the individual photos and sends it to a program.
I have a small income, and it had better be excellent for that price, I was just wondering if you had to choose only one, would it be that one? However, we all need multiple gadgets for our needs.

GenealogySleuth said...

I do not edit in the program so I can't say how or if it does so. I have a large ADF flatbed printer/scanner/copier/fax but I find myself using this one most. It may be I have it set up in a more convenient place. However, this is the best IMO for duplex scanning and pictures so, at this point, I'd chose this one. I still have a lot of pictures to go and it made short work of the duplexing

The all in ne is cheaper without auto duplexing. Look online for prices of auto duplexing all in ones if you have much duplex scanning and this will become cheaper. If you don't have a lot of duplexing then I'd probably stick with what I was familiar with and already paid for.