I recently digitized my family’s (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather’s cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I’m sure I’ll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather’s Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.
Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don’t guarantee the scans came through without error.
Some years back I embarked on a project to scan my parents pictures. I think there were over 4,000 until I was done. I don’t remember the ratio, but there were some negatives and some prints. Oh and trying to unduplicate (this picture is a print of this negative) was a bear, because the prints and pictures had sometimes gotten separated.
I set up the scanner in the living room and worked on it while we were watching TV. It took months, but I did it.
Then I did my in-laws’ pictures, who didn’t have nearly as many, fortunately. And they were better organized to start, so that felt like a walk in the park by comparison.
I noticed my parents took a ton of pictures of my older brothers, but very few of me… But there were a ton of pictures of the bridge construction next to their house… Hmmm!
My brother in Christ, please tell me what hardware you used and method. I have around 20K print photos that need digitizing and short of paying out of the wazoo for a professional service to do it, I’m at a total loss
I have an Epson scanner, though I’d have to check the exact model. The one I have has the light so I can scan negatives or prints, but if you’re only doing prints you wouldn’t need that feature.
I used Vuescan to do it. Paid software, but none of the open source options were as smooth for high volume scanning (this was some years ago, so that might have changed). Vuescan did a pretty good job of adjusting colors and all automatically after the scan. It was worth the money for the time savings alone.
Basically just sit there, load the print, hit scan, wait, remove the print, repeat. You’ll learn the sound of the scanner when it’s returning to the top of the glass, at which point the print is safe to remove even if the software is still processing. That saves a little time.
It’s tedious, no question. Scanning negatives is better because you can get up to six in one shot. Get a second negative holder and you can have one scanning while you’re setting up the other one. It took me months and months.
Also consider culling the pictures you scan. Did I need to scan all of those rolls of the bridge construction? Nah.
Edit - your comment has me thinking, I need work in winter time. Maybe this could be a side job…
Yeah. I don’t remember how many of the pictures I scanned were prints, but it was quite a few, maybe close to 1,000. As I said, just watched TV and did it. It’s pretty mindless once you get into the groove doing it.
Like I said before, I did try to find the negatives and scan those instead when possible. Better quality and more efficient. But for quite a few, no negatives. I also had to take pictures out of frames and stuff like that. My parents wedding picture was in a cardboard frame I had to disassemble carefully…
To be fair, with two daughters that are 1.5 years apart, we also have many more of our older daughter. We had more time to take pictures between naps and active time and less attention split once our second was born. Do I have remorse of having less pictures of our youngest? Of course, but it really was a challenge to get as many pictures with a 2 year old running around a baby that can’t even crawl yet!
Tapes are easy, get a cassette player of any kind with a headphone jack, jack that into your PC’s 3.5mm hole, and use Tenacity (audacity bad now, tenacity good fork) to record side A and B into two tracks which you can later split up into individual songs if need be. The Super 8 camcorder however idk, that sounds more difficult than audio tapes lol!
But scanning photos? Just get a Brother laser printer/scanner combo and scan them hoes yourself!
In related news does anyone know of a good photo printer? I have to go the other way and make my digitals into physicals! I could go to a pharmacy still I think but it’d be cool if I could do it myself.
Thanks! I do have several cassette players, including the one my grandmother recently used to listen to these same tapes. I assumed the process is similar to what you laid out but have yet to get my system set up for said conversion.
And for the photos, I’m already planning that too. I have a stand alone scanner but know it’s a very tedious process from past personal scanning projects, and I have a tote full of I scanned photos. Maybe I’ll task my oldest with it later this year I’m her “down time” lol.
I have an HP multi function that can print on multiple types of paper, including cardstock, photo and glossy magazine. I’ve made reprinted NES instruction booklets on it even. I know everyone says “HP Bad”, but they are all making the toner move. I accidentally updated my dad’s Epson color inkjet printer and it started complaining about his black ink cartridge. Lesson learned, just don’t update firmware on ANY brand and block their update servers at your router if possible.
If you get anything digitized, sanity check the results, my mother in law got some done that were really weird, like some other family’s stuff and then it just cut out or something. I don’t think they put any effort into making sure it was correct. Especially if it’s somewhere disposing of the originals.
I recently digitized my family’s (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather’s cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I’m sure I’ll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather’s Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.
Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don’t guarantee the scans came through without error.
Some years back I embarked on a project to scan my parents pictures. I think there were over 4,000 until I was done. I don’t remember the ratio, but there were some negatives and some prints. Oh and trying to unduplicate (this picture is a print of this negative) was a bear, because the prints and pictures had sometimes gotten separated.
I set up the scanner in the living room and worked on it while we were watching TV. It took months, but I did it.
Then I did my in-laws’ pictures, who didn’t have nearly as many, fortunately. And they were better organized to start, so that felt like a walk in the park by comparison.
I noticed my parents took a ton of pictures of my older brothers, but very few of me… But there were a ton of pictures of the bridge construction next to their house… Hmmm!
My brother in Christ, please tell me what hardware you used and method. I have around 20K print photos that need digitizing and short of paying out of the wazoo for a professional service to do it, I’m at a total loss
I have an Epson scanner, though I’d have to check the exact model. The one I have has the light so I can scan negatives or prints, but if you’re only doing prints you wouldn’t need that feature.
I used Vuescan to do it. Paid software, but none of the open source options were as smooth for high volume scanning (this was some years ago, so that might have changed). Vuescan did a pretty good job of adjusting colors and all automatically after the scan. It was worth the money for the time savings alone.
Basically just sit there, load the print, hit scan, wait, remove the print, repeat. You’ll learn the sound of the scanner when it’s returning to the top of the glass, at which point the print is safe to remove even if the software is still processing. That saves a little time.
It’s tedious, no question. Scanning negatives is better because you can get up to six in one shot. Get a second negative holder and you can have one scanning while you’re setting up the other one. It took me months and months.
Also consider culling the pictures you scan. Did I need to scan all of those rolls of the bridge construction? Nah.
Edit - your comment has me thinking, I need work in winter time. Maybe this could be a side job…
Holy shit. You crazy motherfucker. You actually put the photos on the frame one by one? And scanned them one by one?
I gotta say…
You may be insane, but you get the job done, as opposed to me, who am still trying to figure out the best way to do it.
That’s why we are still trying to understand how they built the pyramids, while the pyramid builders simply did it.
Yeah. I don’t remember how many of the pictures I scanned were prints, but it was quite a few, maybe close to 1,000. As I said, just watched TV and did it. It’s pretty mindless once you get into the groove doing it.
Like I said before, I did try to find the negatives and scan those instead when possible. Better quality and more efficient. But for quite a few, no negatives. I also had to take pictures out of frames and stuff like that. My parents wedding picture was in a cardboard frame I had to disassemble carefully…
To be fair, with two daughters that are 1.5 years apart, we also have many more of our older daughter. We had more time to take pictures between naps and active time and less attention split once our second was born. Do I have remorse of having less pictures of our youngest? Of course, but it really was a challenge to get as many pictures with a 2 year old running around a baby that can’t even crawl yet!
Tapes are easy, get a cassette player of any kind with a headphone jack, jack that into your PC’s 3.5mm hole, and use Tenacity (audacity bad now, tenacity good fork) to record side A and B into two tracks which you can later split up into individual songs if need be. The Super 8 camcorder however idk, that sounds more difficult than audio tapes lol!
But scanning photos? Just get a Brother laser printer/scanner combo and scan them hoes yourself!
In related news does anyone know of a good photo printer? I have to go the other way and make my digitals into physicals! I could go to a pharmacy still I think but it’d be cool if I could do it myself.
Thanks! I do have several cassette players, including the one my grandmother recently used to listen to these same tapes. I assumed the process is similar to what you laid out but have yet to get my system set up for said conversion.
And for the photos, I’m already planning that too. I have a stand alone scanner but know it’s a very tedious process from past personal scanning projects, and I have a tote full of I scanned photos. Maybe I’ll task my oldest with it later this year I’m her “down time” lol.
I’m currently looking for a good laser printer myself, if I get my hands on one I’ll pass the deets to you.
Brother laser printers are the move for sure, but as for photo printers I’m at a loss.
Hell, Brother probably makes one now that I think about it, hmm…
What are you doing, step printer? That’s not where cartridge go!
I have an HP multi function that can print on multiple types of paper, including cardstock, photo and glossy magazine. I’ve made reprinted NES instruction booklets on it even. I know everyone says “HP Bad”, but they are all making the toner move. I accidentally updated my dad’s Epson color inkjet printer and it started complaining about his black ink cartridge. Lesson learned, just don’t update firmware on ANY brand and block their update servers at your router if possible.
Oh for sure lol, never update it, I usually don’t give printers access to the network anyway, I’ll just use a cable! I’ll check out that HP, thanks!
If you get anything digitized, sanity check the results, my mother in law got some done that were really weird, like some other family’s stuff and then it just cut out or something. I don’t think they put any effort into making sure it was correct. Especially if it’s somewhere disposing of the originals.
If I digitize anything, I only trust myself with that. I’m too OCD to trust a third party!