Easy way to transfer tons of old photos to flash drive
DW's been organizing our old photos (500-1000 or therabouts). I was looking for semi-quick and easy way to copy photos onto flash drive. Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Forum Discussion
You likely have a cheap scanner, pretty difficult today to buy a cheap inkjet printer without getting the scanner/copier functions too. Most will do a halfway decent job with prints.
For best results, it is a lot of work, photo scanner (Epson or Canon) about $200 to $500 will come with decent photo scanning software and something for image processing, editing, cataloging; Epson ships Photoshop Elements with photo scanners.
I've been through the scanning on all-in-one, redoing the work now on Epson V500, first pass costs me about 3 to 5 minutes per image, scanning, editing, cataloging into my library, tagging on people and subjects. But that's a whole lot more than just getting pictures onto a flash drive. Its worth the time for me because 15,000 to 20,000 prints, negatives, slides cover a lifetime of serious sports and travel photography I want to preserve, and a couple thousand more of family memories from collections of prints back into the late 19 th century.
Easy way is to hire out the work, it is also 'quick' in the sense of requiring little of your time, but not necessarily turnaround time. Costs can range from a fraction of a dollar to a few dollars per image, depending on the quality of the work you want done. Kodak used to do it at a fairly low cost, their PhotoCD program. They could do much better with negatives and slides, vs prints, as all too many prints are made on "copyproof" paper finishes, and color prints fade fast if they wre any good to start with. Lowest cost today is discount store photo labs, best quality is professional labs at maybe 10x the price.
For best results, it is a lot of work, photo scanner (Epson or Canon) about $200 to $500 will come with decent photo scanning software and something for image processing, editing, cataloging; Epson ships Photoshop Elements with photo scanners.
I've been through the scanning on all-in-one, redoing the work now on Epson V500, first pass costs me about 3 to 5 minutes per image, scanning, editing, cataloging into my library, tagging on people and subjects. But that's a whole lot more than just getting pictures onto a flash drive. Its worth the time for me because 15,000 to 20,000 prints, negatives, slides cover a lifetime of serious sports and travel photography I want to preserve, and a couple thousand more of family memories from collections of prints back into the late 19 th century.
Easy way is to hire out the work, it is also 'quick' in the sense of requiring little of your time, but not necessarily turnaround time. Costs can range from a fraction of a dollar to a few dollars per image, depending on the quality of the work you want done. Kodak used to do it at a fairly low cost, their PhotoCD program. They could do much better with negatives and slides, vs prints, as all too many prints are made on "copyproof" paper finishes, and color prints fade fast if they wre any good to start with. Lowest cost today is discount store photo labs, best quality is professional labs at maybe 10x the price.
