Okay, beat me up if this has been covered in the past.

Or maybe post the link? Haven't found one in a search.

Got a crap ton of old family photos to scan, save, and hopefully catalog. Have a windows system that I am updating anyway. Willing to update to Mac if there is a significant increase in speed, etc. Hoping to find fast and accurate scanning with good detail.

Have a good flatbed scanner, and still have an old Epson Fast Foto FF680W that I've used in the past. Flatbed is s...l....o....w..... Fast Foto is pretty decent, but is there something faster and better out there?

Will any current PC with a decent processor do the job? Current rig is Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz, with 16GB ram. (Yes, it's old)

Basically, if you had a lot of photos to scan, and a Chevy budget, not a Cadillac budget, what would you buy?

(Willing to go for top of the line Chevy )

TIA

No personal experience with this but I just saw an ad for an app called Photomyne that lets you scan with your iPhone. Again, I have not done this and this is not an endorsement but you might investigate. I'm sure it is not free.

Tailgate88 said:

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No personal experience with this but I just saw an ad for an app called Photomyne that lets you scan with your iPhone. Again, I have not done this and this is not an endorsement but you might investigate. I'm sure it is not free.

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I wouldn't scan with a phone. The quality for something like family pictures just won't be very good.

I don't think the computer is really the bottleneck here. The scanner is what's going to be doing all the work and the computer is just the download point.

Tend to agree with the phone. Also on the scanner being the choke point. But my old computer is starting to fail, so it's an excuse to update both

Phone would definitely be a step down in quality. I was thinking it was a trade off for speed but looking at some reviews it looks like these scanners will do a picture every second or two so never mind that idea!

Can you upgrade the ram? That will help make it a bit faster.

Also it seems you will likely need to upgrade your hard drive too.

Thinking an external hard drive just for photos.

And again, the machine is pretty old and due for an update. So more ram might help, but I'm thinking more like an excuse for a new desktop.

CanyonAg77 said:

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Thinking an external hard drive just for photos.

And again, the machine is pretty old and due for an update. So more ram might help, but I'm thinking more like an excuse for a new desktop.

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Unless it is hooked to the motherboard, it will be slow access the files. Also make sure you backup the scanned photos to the cloud as external drives can have a high failure rate within a few years.

I vote a new computer.