OT: My photo collection

[Bob Jersey]

As I work towards some kind of post-parents solution in my own life, with my brother Allen managing the house for now, I've started to digitize photos I've taken almost exclusively with disposable cameras between the early 1990s and early 2000s. I can do that with the HP F2210 combo printer/scanner dad got (free?) with a previous computer... the colour ink cart is getting low, and I'll get more this week.

Locations are generally either the Lehigh Valley or NY/NJ.

If I still have creds at some cloud site for them, I'll follow up with its URL.

B

[Jay Lewis]

Imgur, Picasa, Flickr are all good photo hosting sites. Picasa, being
Google based, should have the least restriction on space.

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[Adam Bowie]

Bob,

One of my great projects-I've-not-quite-got-around-to is digitising my old photos. I have a big plastic container of hundreds that I want to digitise but it's so slow. So good luck with all your scanning! (I also have a whole bunch on MiniDV video tapes that I want to digitise too, but that's another story)

For what it's worth, I'd have thought the scanner part of the combo printer/scanner should work even if you don't have a cartridge for it.

Good luck with it all!

Adam

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[Bob Jersey]

Adam Bowie, to moi, in part:

For what it's worth, I'd have thought the scanner part of the combo printer/scanner should work even if you don't have a cartridge for it.

That's probably the case, tho as of now only the colour cart should be switched; black should hang on for a little bit.
 

Good luck with it all!

 
Thanks.

B

[PGage]

Bob - I am working on the same project. Preparing to move after about 20 years in current house - in going through tons of old crap to throw out/give away we found a couple of bags of hundreds of old photos from 80s and 90s. I have sorted through and identified the ones I want to digitize, and am getting ready for hours of scanning on my combo printer/scanner. In the back of my mind I have been wondering if there is an affordable, dedicated photo scanner on the market that would make the job easier and faster.

Also looking for a good place to keep and share them with family - appreciate the suggestions from Jay (Imgur, Picasa, Flickr). I am not familiar with any of these. Aside from the space restrictions, any other reasons to use one over the other?

[Adam Bowie]

I've conducted a certain amount of research into the mass scanning of photos without spending hours at a scanner and come to the conclusion that broadly speaking there isn't an especially good home solution.

There are various companies who will do bulk scanning for you, either in your own country or slightly cheaper if they ship the photos somewhere like India. All of them seem to work on a similar basis - relatively cheap for a basic scan, but more for restoration of colour, or removal from albums. They seem to use some quite costly high quality scanners. ScanCafe would be an example of such a service. They'll usually either send the photos back to you on DVDs/USBs, or make them available as downloads. Look to pay 20c an image. Of course you're putting your trust heavily in couriers/delivery companies which is the scariest thing about this. But they handle it all for you.

For home scanning there's nothing really there. I actually own a document scanner - the Fujitsu iX500. This handles paper really well and is great for documents you want scanned. It scans the documents as fast as the massive copiers in an office/copy-centre might scan them. But it's really not suitable for quality photos. It'll do them, but not great.

Sadly, I think it's a laborious home process if you're not going to "outsource" the problem. I guess if you've got kids you might be able to incetivise them to do it well for something. Or maybe it's a dull task you can do while watching your favourite not-terribly-demanding boxset.

As to where you save the photos, I can offer a few thoughts.

Flickr: Free for the first 1TB of photos. This is a massive amount - and should account for tens of thousands of photos. Obviously it's owned by Yahoo which is in the process of being sold to Verizon. I've been a "Pro" user for more than ten years now, which removes ads. I have over 17,000 photos and that uses less than 100GB, so loads of room. Flickr hasn't been developed as much as it should have been, but it does allow me to easily embed photos elsewhere, and you can change the privacy settings as you wish, including letting friends and family have access to albums even if they're not Flickr members themselves. (There's also an app that can upload copies of all your mobile photos direct to Flickr)

Google Photos (was Picasa): Basically you get this free with a Google/Gmail account. They allow unlimited uploads if you keep the resolution below 16 megapixels.  Depending on how you scan your photos, you'll probably find that you can get in under this limit and essentially get free storage from Google. If your photos are massive, then you start to use the space in Google Drive (starts at 25GB I believe). You can choose whether photos are private or public. (You can also get an app to upload copies of all your mobile photos direct to Google Photos).

Imagur: Don't know anything about this.

Amazon: Also has a photos backup service for Prime members. Amazon's plan allows unlimited photo uploads regardless of size. Great if you've already got Prime. 

One way or another, if you're digitising your photos, I thoroughly recommend finding somewhere online to save your photos even if they're not for public display. I've recently been embarking on a big backup plan for all my data so it's safely stored both at home and online somewhere. I'm actually paying for Amazon Drive which in the UK is an extra premium on top of my Amazon Prime account. But since it's unlimited it means I can store nearly anything - photos, home video, music etc. (I think most of these service are a bit "funny" about storing video files you might have acquired elsewhere). 

Sadly I think in a digital world, far too many of us don't think about storage properly. I still remember an old work colleague who had a burglary at home and lost an external hard drive that had all his photos on it. They weren't backed up anywhere else and despite the drive being low value, he lost priceless images. 

Adam

[PGage]

Adam...

Thanks, this was all extremely helpful. I was going to go with my amazon prime option, but not sure how that will work for family members who don't have it. Based on your comments I think I will explore Flickr (Verizon is my wireless carrier, so that makes me feel a little better). And yes, I am planning on a massive scanning couple of days while watching last season of Orange is the New Black. If there is no handy and easy photo scanning machine, I will just try to make myself as comfortable as possible with my cheap printer/scanner and hunker down.

I agree about the online backup; we were burglarized two years ago, and it was only dumb luck (and dumb burglars) that they did not find my home office (which is in the garage). My daughter lost both her computer and back-up drive. If they had taken my back up we would have been screwed. I have backed up most current photos now, but still have so many (thousands) of important work related documents I have created over years that would pain me to lose, but which I only have backed up on an external drive. I should move what I can to Google I guess at least.

[Adam Bowie]

I keep most of my files on a pair network drives. Each of these has a pair of drives that mirror one another - in other words, there are two hard drives in each device with duplicate copies. This is basically to avoid hard drive failure, as a basic rule of law for me is that if there are moving parts in something, it will eventually break. 

But that didn't get around either being robbed or my flat burning down (the former being much likelier). A previous "off-site" back-up solution I had was simply a third hard drive which I kept in a desk drawer at work. Once a month I'd bring it home and do a backup, then drop it back at work the following day.

[Doug Eastick]

I highly recommend the Google Photos option for the cloud . 

I've used Flickr since before yahoo bought it.  but now I'm a Google photos guy .   the face recognition is really cool too.

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 1:55 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Bob - I am working on the same project. Preparing to move after about 20 years in current house - in going through tons of old crap to throw out/give away we found a couple of bags of hundreds of old photos from 80s and 90s. I have sorted through and identified the ones I want to digitize, and am getting ready for hours of scanning on my combo printer/scanner. In the back of my mind I have been wondering if there is an affordable, dedicated photo scanner on the market that would make the job easier and faster.

Also looking for a good place to keep and share them with family - appreciate the suggestions from Jay (Imgur, Picasa, Flickr). I am not familiar with any of these. Aside from the space restrictions, any other reasons to use one over the other?

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 8:15 AM, Bob Jersey <bob.in...@juno.com> wrote:

Adam Bowie, to moi, in part:

For what it's worth, I'd have thought the scanner part of the combo printer/scanner should work even if you don't have a cartridge for it.

That's probably the case, tho as of now only the colour cart should be switched; black should hang on for a little bit.
 

Good luck with it all!

 
Thanks.

B

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[Jay Lewis]

Some things I've thought of:

* Imgur is good for just storing/sharing pics. The interface is kind of
crude & probably not something to be used for "archival" purposes.

* If you're not planning on printing your pics, you can get away with a
low(ish) resolution scan. A 150dpi scan should be twice as fast as a
300dpi scan.

* Buy a cheap(ish) all-in-one scanner/printer with a USB port. I was
given one and it allows you to scan directly to the thumb drive. Load
5-6 pics on the scanner, hit scan and move onto the next 5-6 pics.
Cut/divide them later on your computer while you listen to podcasts or
whatever or whenever you have time.

* A guy I know has 12 (maybe more) TERAbytes on his personal home media
server. 6Tb for storage (photos, movies, mp3s, etc) and 6Tb for nightly
back-up. It's pretty standard thinking to have double capacity so you
can fully backup everything. And, if you can, you definitely want
off-site/multiple location storage.

* Solid-state storage (I.e. thumb drives) is better than other media.
You can't scratch, shatter, etc them like a DVD or a HDD. Also the size
issue.

* Read the TOS of any cloud service, if you use one. Facebook can use
any media you upload to "your" page for any reason (I.e. monetizing your
content) they want.

[Bob Jersey]

Moi, Tuesday (25), in part:

Locations are generally either the Lehigh Valley or NY/NJ.

If I still have creds at some cloud site for them, I'll follow up with its URL.

To answer some of your questions, I went with Google Photos (link), and given the average quality of the originals, it worked out well. Here's the first roll (link), mostly Jersey City around 2000 when the light railway opened; there's a couple I took from a ferry tour of the lower Hudson, and two are from Celtic Classic (link), held the last weekend Sept. in Bethlehem, PA (territory in common with Musikfest)

I just found a pack from 2006, prolly all from a Hoboken fall festival headlined by The Trammps (of course they did "Disco Inferno", to a recording, but their singing voices were still super!), and once that's up I think I've got them all.

B

[Doug Eastick]

your link for First Roll gave me a 404.   maybe you haven't Shared it -- you have to do that explicity to get a public link.

Once your photos are in, give it a few days then search for things like "beer", "bridge" and other stuff.  The recognition is cool.

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[Bob Jersey]

Doug Eastick, to moi:

your link for First Roll gave me a 404.   maybe you haven't Shared it -- you have to do that explicity to get a public link.

Once your photos are in, give it a few days then search for things like "beer", "bridge" and other stuff.  The recognition is cool.

Figured it out, here's the new link for the first roll (link)

B

[Bob Jersey]

Here's roll #2 (link)... I'm guessing early 2000s, but definitely since 9/11. For some strange reason GP didn't accept all the pix... is that just a case of possible issues with each image?

In 2002 NJ extended the Newark light railway to Bloomfield, including a new maintenance shop for the cars (there was a ceremony, but I might have gotten there afterwards); I then visited a NYC transit fair with a slew of vintage buses near the federal courthouse in Brooklyn (wasn't that in a couple L&Os?), not far from the underground transit museum, and some more street fairs; the plaque is where the original Abraham & Straus department store stood.

B

[Bob Jersey]

The basketball and handball courts were back in Manhattan, near the Village.  B

[Bob Jersey]

Now, roll #3 (link):  This one may have been completely shot within weeks, if not days, of 9/11/01.  It would not have been unusual for me in those years to (try to) cram many things into one day down there, and carefully plan how I'd get from one spot to another, which by that point was getting somewhat easier...

Parade through "Little India" in Jersey City (I love the food, but it don't treat me right); one of those "Try Transit Day" festivals at Hoboken Terminal (one of those shots is literally feet from where that train crashed!), looked inside one of Amtrak's Acela trains; that little, boxy mini-bus with the NJT colours replaced a bunch of Flxibles they farmed out to little routes run by indie ops, including the one in Phillipsburg across the river from Easton; I wanted to get one last shot of the towers after that last one of the Italian festival in Sinatra Drive... ran out of film.

B

[Bob Jersey]

Roll #4 (link) is a mixed bag from 2000.

From the local area are demolition shots from Allentown of the remains of iconic Hess's department store, where now stands an office building, slightly taller and with a mess of glass; the aftermath of a fire in a narrow side street in Easton; and a neighborhood theater in Allentown that had been vacant since '89 and was later demolished.

Ones from NY/NJ include the opening of the Hudson/Bergen Light Railway, to whose ceremony I was able to make it (a non-shaky view inside one of the cars from some reason didn't take); the plaque describing its small theater predecessor that used to be inside the Times Square Visitors Center, now reportedly just nondescript storage; the 9th Avenue festival (hadn't Letterman covered that at some point?); and an exhibit of classic racing cars in Rockefeller Center.

B