The scanning project

Posted on September 2, 2007
Filed Under All, Photos |

Prints in boxes in garage
One of the things on my ‘new life to-do list’ is to deal with my old prints and transparencies, which have been eating up a huge space in the garage these last 17 (!) years or so. Most of the prints are 11×14 inches - it was the standard print size used at the L.A. Herald Examiner where I worked for 13 years - so standard, relatively inexpensive 8.5×11 or 8.5×14 scanners don’t really do the job.

Last year, I bought a Mustek 11×17 scanner for $180. It is relatively lo-res (300 dpi native) with a limited dynamic range and terrible Windows 2000-era software. It is very slow, a situation compounded by its USB 1.1 interface: I did manage to do a high-res scan of one of Joe Ferris’ canvases for friend Nils Grevillius which, with a few dozen other scans probably got me more than even (large format scans are expensive). But the Mustek is not a good choice for what I have in mind - it takes about 45 minutes to do a high-res scan..

So, we’ve received the Epson GT-15000 high-res 11×17 scanner we ordered earlier. Old friend Bob McCrary is dropping by today, and I’m hoping he’ll help me set up a scanning workstation in the garage. There are about 15 plastic storage boxes of prints, negs and transparencies. Doing a little math, I’m guessing I averaged 3 assignments a day at the Herex, which is 15 pictures a week (assuming one ‘keeper’ photo per assignment).

15 pictures/week times 50 weeks times 13 years equals 9650 pictures. Given that a lot of these things would have been mug shots and the like, I’m guessing there are probably about 5000 reasonably interesting pictures sitting in those boxes, which also have yellowing clips showing how the photos were played in the paper.

So, job 1 is to figure out how to organize the scans: I wonder if there’s some ‘official’ photo archiving scheme used by libraries et al.? I think I’ll use Lightroom to do the archiving: Vuescan on a wireless laptop will likely be the scanner input set up. I’ll probably use Acrobat to scan in and OCR the clips, and I want to attach story and caption info to the scan - something I think Lightroom can do that using the IPTC XML schema (it’s what the wire services use - maybe that’s my ‘official’ format). As for work flow, I’m hoping we can do 10-25 scans a day for 50-125 per week… take about a year… we’re going to need a lot of storage, too…