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.

How many photos do you have? This is likely cheaper than a new computer and scanner:

https://www.houstonscanning.com/pricing

Depending on your resolution and file type you may not see a huge improvement in time even with a newer computer.

I guess even 5 or 10 seconds saved and 1,000 photos would add up.

I think a new computer would help. A little with the scanning and moreso with your workflow. An m2 portable SSD and the faster USB bus will allow you edit and save right to the drive. You can even edit video over USB 3. Anything modern or you can get extra fancy if the new machine and external are Thunderbolt.

Another way to save time if this is an option is to mix it up with resolution and file types. Maybe only scan some of the photos at the highest resolution and tiff format. Then scan everything else at 300 to 600 dpi and jpeg. Especially stuff you know you won't print.

I was able to use someone's Epson V850 to scan some old photos of my great grandparents and repair them in Photoshop. 6400 dpi and tiff file format,. The scans took a long time on a really high horsepower computer. I guess some of that is just putting the pieces together.

Are these from printed photographs or from slides?

Mainly prints, do have some slides

CanyonAg77 said:

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Mainly prints, do have some slides

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We have a slide reader but nobody seems to want to use it for much. Between my father and my brother, we have many thousands of slides. I don't know how many have been scanned in, but I have yet to see any of them.

I think that I'm supposed to eat supper sometime this week with a couple of nephews, one of whom has used the slide reader. I'll ask him how easy it is to use.