how to save old b/w photos?

[California Girl]

the photos are important to me....esp the ones in the family album...

Then, seriously, your best plan would be to get hold of a scanner, scan in the pics, save them as 'high resolution' then burn them to CD and back them up onto a flash or portable hard drive. Then you have the originals, plus two copies.

 

[editec]

editec, can you please explain how to crop? My PC came with Paint and I don't want to buy Photoshop.

Thankies.

strollingbones: your scanner will have a surface area of about 11 x 14. Anything you scan that is smaller will have white space in the uncovered areas. It'll look like this if you don't crop:

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I'm not familiar with the program you're working with, so I cannot tell you how to crop with it.

Based on that image, you first need to rotate it before you can attempt to crop it

But I can tell you that PShop is a software tool that works very well for what you're trying to do.

For example, if I have 1000 photos to scan, I could probably do that task, and get them published on line, too, in about a day or two.

FYI, when I first started working on Rosetta, what I can do today (thanks to improving hardware and software and the fact that I got good at the task, too) used to take me about a week.

One of the things I know is that the whole task is a LOT easier, if, when you scan, you scan consistently.

Put each photo in the same place on the scanner for each scan. This makes your post scanning editing process ever so much easier.

If you'd like to come to Maine, I'll teach you how to do it. A few hours and the whole process (which I've been doing for the last 15 years) will be easy as pie.

But still, what you're trying to do with inferior sofware is damned hard because you aren't just using the right software tools.

I don't know if there's any free software suited to your needs.

My guess is there must be.

I absolutely must have things work right to publish at the rate I publish (at least one book a week) , so I have never bothered to investigate that free software issue.

Cute picture, BTW.

So Mad, if this is a truly important project for you, then contact me by PM, and I'll give you my phone number and we can talk about how you can get this task done right.

 

[editec]

ed you have mistaken me for someone who understands all that?

LOL!

I'm sorry, Stroll.

I get so used to these terms, I forget I'm speaking geek.

DPI is dots per inch.

It describes how much raw data the image will have.

Your screen shows images at around 72-80 dpi.

So if you scan at that resolution, your image on the screen will be the same size as the original.

If your digital image is at a resultion that is higher than that, then the computer screen makes the image on the screen bigger than the original.

I scan at very high resoltions (usually 300 dpi) so that I'm working with very good images as I clean them (digitally)

But in order for them to be seen in their entirety on the computer screen, I must reduced the DPI somewhat to make the image small enough to fit on the screen.

In the real world, I could show you this much more easily than I can explain it to you in ASCII.

It's simply to understand, really, when you see how this plays out on the screen. And it's kind of difficult to understand when its explained in words.

Like most people who are doing something every day, we tend to forget that what we think is obvious, isn't obvious to somebody who doesn't do it.

 

[namvet]

the photos are important to me....esp the ones in the family album...

I had a bunch to. I scanned them in and saved to a CD. I aslo put them in "my pics" which i backup with my docs on a CD.

and i put them in a zipped folder, attached to an email, and sent them back to me. then into my PFC folder. so now they are saved online

 

[THE LIGHT]

the photos are important to me....esp the ones in the family album...

Then, seriously, your best plan would be to get hold of a scanner, scan in the pics, save them as 'high resolution' then burn them to CD and back them up onto a flash or portable hard drive. Then you have the originals, plus two copies.

Yes, that is what I usually do... and then you can print the ones you really like looking at often. Also, they make external hard drives that can hold up to several terabytes of photos. Just be sure to mirror in case one crashes.

 

[Baruch Menachem]

You can buy cheap external CD's.


The best thing you can do with them all is keep them as they are. The paper is acid free, Black and white does not fade. (It is the original silver nitrate stuff.) The paper won't go bad either.

Color photos are the problematic ones. They use dyes which fade, and the paper tech changed back in the late 60s, so the more recent papers are more likely to be acid paper. Which means that if you are preserving photos, the color ones should be done first.

Best thing is to get a cheap external drive, save everything to that, then burn CD's from the drive.

Cool thing about burning CD's is you can organize the pictures the way you want on them.

I have the same issue.

I have a great big box of family photos that need to be scanned. Need to be sorted too.