Advice needed on scanning old photos

[bailout]

I have several boxes of old family photos that I want to scan. They range from early 1900s prints that actually show a lot of detail to more recent normal 6x4 standard prints. My scanner is an epson v300. It seems to scan prints quite well but isn't great with slides.

I am not sure on what choices I should make re resolution, file type and tagging. It will be quite a big project to get them all done and I don't want to do them and then wish I had chosen a different file type or something. On the other hand they aren't of national importance and I am not at this stage thinking of throwing the originals away and hence I don't want to be too precious about it if not needed. I want the process to be fairly easy and quick and not end up with too big an archive.

The first issue is resolution. This is really a choice between 300 and 600 dpi. I may vary this depending on the source. Some of the older prints have a lot of detail whereas the later ones less so.

File type is the big question. Tiff would obviously be the best one for retaining most info but produces large file sizes. Jpeg will be smaller and easier to deal with but is lossy. Is it worth looking at anything else like png? I also am looking into tagging the photos so this may also have an implication for file type.

Tagging; I want to record info about the photos i.e. who, where, when etc. If I don't get this info from parents etc now then the photos won't mean anything in the future. The best way would seem to be writing it to image tags so that the info is embedded with the scans. However, there seem to be several tagging standards, exif, hptc, xmp, sidecar files. I don't want to tag them and find that in a few years they are unreadable because the standards are obsolete. The other option would be to write the info into an external format such as a spreadsheet but I would prefer to have the info embedded.

Any advice on the above issues would be appreciated especially from anyone who has done something similar.

Another issue with scanning I haven't been able to find a definitive answer to is whether it is better to make adjustments such as levels in the scanning software or to do it afterwards in pp. Does the scanning software adjust the 'raw' data or the final format data?

thanks

 

[TheBigYin]

Personally, I'd scan the ones I wanted to do something with and just preserve the rest in a decent album. The Silver gelatine prints will very probably outlast any digital backup media. If however you want to scan 'em - say for a dvd slideshow to pass onto other family members say, then I'd scan 'em at 600 dpi - that way at least you could print them at twice the width and height of the original should you need to without any real loss in quality. I've recently done a similar exercise with 2 shoeboxes of old prints, and scanned at 600dpi, saving the files as .jpg's. This came up with files that were plenty large enough to make a dvd slideshow with - even from the 6x4.5 contact sheet 120 images that seemed to be a good half of the older ones. I then pulled them into Lightroom and tagged them from there. This also gave me a chance to go through and colour correct the shots where needed, or to tweak light/dark on the B&W's.

Frankly I think you're getting a bit over-concerned - if you're keeping the originals, just look after and keep the originals. If you want a quick digital re-purposing, then do a quick and dirty .jpg scan job on them. If you want to print an occasionall one out at a suitable size for framing, then scan it as high a resolution as your scanner can perform, save it as .tiff, and do the colour/tone correction in CS5, not forgetting to retouch the dust spots etc.

And a last piece of advice - pre-soft them into bundles of the same people, 10 or so at a time, and do one bundle a day - only takes half a hour that way, not long enough to get bored with it!

 

[bailout]

Thanks for the reply.