Backing up Photographs
Dec. 5, 2007 by ravishan
About three weeks ago, Nalini and I were watching a story on the San Diego fires, Nalini asked me, “Whatever happened to your idea of backing up the valuable photographs of our children?”. Though I had transferred all my digital pictures to Google’s Picasaweb sometime ago as a backup, I had not done anything about pictures that were not born digital.
I began scanning negatives last winter, but after a while, I got very tired by the time and effort it took. So, here I am, guilty of neglecting something that I agreed to. And when the question is cast that way - “valuable photographs of our children” – the guilt was too much to handle.So I have been scanning photographs diligently for the past three weeks and am happy to report that I have managed to digitize over 1500 photographs and upload them to Picasaweb. The fact that it is labor intensive is the downside, but the memories associated with the pictures from the past is priceless.
Coincidentally, I happen to read about this topic in Newsweek… There are some good pointers there including Sharpcast that you may want to check out.
What I do is to place four photographs at a time on my scanner with enough gap between each of them and scan. I don’t worry too much about how straight I placed them because Photoshop that I use later to process them takes care of it for me. I scan it using 600 dpi resolution. I tried it at 1200 dpi, but the time it took and the file sizes were too much to handle.
Most scanning softwares have automatic file naming conventions, so repeating this for a set of four photographs is just a few clicks on the computer. But you need to take them out of the album, scan it and put it back. It is a pain… But the sweet memories and the notes on the back of some of the photographs makes it worth it…
After I am done with a few albums, I diligently mark the inside of each album with a marker to indicate that this has been scanned so as to avoid duplication later. After that I process each of the scanned jpg file in Photoshop. Photoshop has a nice option under File>Automate Menu item called Crop and straighten pictures. This basically cuts the consolidated scanned image into four separate pictures and nicely straightens your pictures. Then I save each of these photographs under appropriately titled folders.
The folders where the photographs have been stored is discoverable by picasa and publishable at the original resolution to Google’s web site. In addition, I backup all my laptops to two separate external USB hard drives. So, I have three copies of all my photographs at this point. This doesn’t cost much (500 GB external drive was $110; 10 GB additional storage in Google is a mere $20 a year) once you have done all the hard work of scanning.
I can remember very few (<10) pictures of mine as a child. It was a luxury for us. I cannot find a single one of them now. I hope that all the digital preservation of our family pictures will be of value to our next generations – time will tell. It may be that I am obsessed with all of this because I myself cannot find a lot about my ancestors and that I want my children and theirs to not feel the same way.
Next task – tag these pictures to death!!!