hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3600.txt

Episode: 3600
Title: HPR3600: Digitizing Photos
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3600/hpr3600.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:01:04

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3600 for Friday, the 20th of May 2022.
Tid's show is entitled, digitizing photos and is part of the series Gimpit is hosted by Ouka
and is about 13 minutes long and carries a clean flag. The summary is how to digitize old prints,
slides and negatives. This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
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Hello, this is Ouka. Welcome you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our Gimp
series. Today, what I want to talk about is how you get your physical photographs, prints,
slides, negatives, etc. into the computer. That means digitizing them. That's going to be the topic
of this particular tutorial. Gimp is a digital photo editing program. Step one is to have your
photos in digital form. Of course, any photos you take with your cell phone or with most
contemporary cameras is already digital, so that does not a problem. But when my wife and I
went on a trip to San Francisco in early 79 or on our honeymoon in late 79, we're on our trip
to England in 1981. We were shooting film and we had even older photos than those that have
meaning to us in our memories. Many of those old photos have problems which we would like to fix
and Gimp is a great tool for doing that, but first we have to get them into digital formats.
There's a number of ways to do that. First of all, the simplest, if you have money and don't
want to tackle it yourself, you can use a service. There's a lot of them.
Now, a few years ago, I retrieved a cache of home movies that my father had shot over the years
and took the films to a local service to have them transferred to a DVD. I could then make copies
with my DVD burner drive, gave them to my mother, my brothers and sisters as Christmas presents.
Digitizing movie film was not something I wanted to take on. And the money at cost was
well worth it in this case, but there is definitely a cost. I went with the straight transfer
option, no editing or retouching, and it crossed me several hundreds of dollars.
Now, you can do the same thing for still photos, slides, and negatives, but you're trading money
for time in that case. So, what are some of the options? I did looking around. I found a place
called Top 10 Reviews. They did a review of what they considered the five best scanning services.
And, of course, all of these links are in the show notes. They said that Scan Digital was the best
overall service. Ever present, they said was the best for choice. Scan Cafe was the best value
for money. Go Photo was the best A la carte scanning service. Digital Memories was the best for
online storage, and Scan My Photos, the best for speed of service. Now, the links in the show notes,
you can read the article from Top 10 Reviews, and then links to individual reviews, etc. So,
there's lots of way to get more information here. So, they said, these were what Top 10 Reviews
said about these services, because I have no particular experience of them. I'm just presenting
this information as a service. Now, I did note that on the Go Photo site, it says that they're
merging with Scan Cafe. So, this might be the top five sites by the time you're listening to this.
Now, as for storage plan, I tend to talk about storage. My intent is to do that in the next
tutorial. Now, in reviewing this list, I noticed that it really is entirely US-centric, but that
may simply be Google is only showing me US companies because it knows I'm in the US.
So, in other countries, you might want to try a little search for something like Best Photo
Scanning Service if you want to go in this direction. But again, the general rule is you're spending
money to avoid spending time and effort if you use a service. So, you are the best judge of what
you have more of. Now, when you have more time than money, the best option is really to scan at
home and you have a number of options here. Some of the options you use equipment you may already
have. Others can use inexpensive equipment. Now, I want to stress that I'm talking about options
on the home hobbyist level. I have no doubt that this sort of person who does photo shoots with
thousands of dollars worth of equipment would not be interested in the stuff that I'm talking about.
I'm addressing the person who may have a few albums of old photos or even, you know,
the old shoebox full of photos who wants to preserve them and maybe share them with family and
friends. You really can do this inexpensively and in some cases for free if you already have the
equipment. Now, I'm going to look at situations based on the media, prints, slides, and negatives.
Those are the big three. Now, in most cases, the output will be JPEG photos, but for most purposes,
this is good enough, particularly if we're talking about photos a few decades or more old.
My photos with my wife go back to the late 1970s, for instance, and the quality is a lot less than
what I can get now on my Pixel 3a phone. But, they're still important to us.
Now, prints. This is the easiest of all because you likely have some of the equipment already.
Your first option is your cell phone. There's a good app available from Google
and it's available both on Android and iPhone devices called Photoscan by Google Photos.
I put a link in the show notes to a review by PC Magazine. You can look at it, but it really is
pretty simple. There are other options as well, such as Snap Seed, Instagram, and EverNote.
All of which can also give you digital copies of your prints.
The nice thing is it's not just limited to photographs. Back when the sort of thing mattered to me,
I had a huge stack of business cards and I decided to just scan them in using the EverNote app so
that I could store them digitally and be less cluttered. That worked perfectly well.
You could use one of these things to scan in some postcards, maybe some ticket stubs,
what other memorabilia that you have that you might want to hang onto,
or at least have an image of. With the quality of cameras and smartphones these days,
that might be all you need. Since most people have a smartphone these days, it makes sense to try
it first. Now, the other main option for prints and so on is of course a flatbed scanner.
Now, you can spend a fortune for one, but you don't have to. The kind you have at home,
if you have one at home, probably does a decent enough job. I've found them for about $100
where I am. They can also, in some cases, scan negatives. I have to say my experience with this
has not been very good. If you have a scanner that can do this, you can of course try it out and see
what you get. Your experience may be better. Slides and negatives. I'm going to take these together
because they're so similar. We have a lot of slides. Most of the photos from our honeymoon,
for instance, are slides. I remember that early on I got a Christmas present from my wife.
It was a slide projector because we had this idea somehow that we were going to be looking at
these slides over and over again and sharing them with friends and family. Well, okay, that didn't
happen. The slides got put into trays, stored away in a closet, and we're coming up on our
42nd wedding anniversary in just a few months. I think a lot of those photos have been
traced for 40 years without anyone looking at them. The problem with digitizing slides is that
you really need some equipment to do it. Again, I've seen flatbed scanners with slide attachments
that should scan them, but I'm going to say my experience has not been good. You could spend a
lot of money for professional grade equipment, but for the home hobbyists, there are some very
affordable options that still produce decent results. The nice thing is that they all let you
digitize negatives and slides. You can tackle both of these things with one device.
Now again, top 10 reviews had a nice round up. They looked at four different devices.
Wolverine Titan 8 and 1 was, they said, the best slide to digital image converter overall.
That was going for about 150.
Digit now, film scanner, the best value converter, only $50.
Sharper image, slide a negative converter, which is the most portable option, that's about
$100, and the Kodak Scanza, which has the largest storage option, and that was about $160.
Now, all of these prices are quoted from Amazon as of the time I'm writing this,
may have changed by the time that this thing comes out on hacker public radio.
Now, as before, the recommendations about each one are what top 10 reviews said about them.
For my money, the sweet spot is the choice between Wolverine and Kodak.
They're about the same price. They're both pretty good. I've seen a number of reviews online
that directly put them head to head, which tells you something. The one I have is the Kodak Scanza,
and I like it. I have no doubt the Wolverine is a fine product. The reviews all say so.
I think I got the Scanza on sale a few years back. It works well with a variety of formats,
including 35mm, 126, 110 slides, and negatives. Comes with a variety of plastic trays into which
the film is loaded, and you move the slide into position manually and scan in the image.
The photos are saved as JPEG images and stored on an SD card. The SD card is not included,
and I always have SD cards around. I consider it office supplies.
Now, the interface can be set for a variety of languages,
and as you move the tray through the device, you can see the image and line it up the way you want.
Now, of course, I plan to do the real editing in GIMP, but it is nice that you can start with a
well framed image. In one feature that is nice is you can flip the image either horizontally or
vertically. Now, I know GIMP can do that perfectly well, but it's nice to have that feature.
Now, in my case, I have an inexpensive card reader with a USB plug, so after I've scanned in a bunch of
photos from negatives or slides, I just take the card out, put it into my USB
plug card reader and copy them onto my computer. So, the bottom line is that digitizing photos does
not need to be really difficult or very expensive. The only expense I had that I would not otherwise
have is buying the scans up. I would have my Pixel 3A in any case, and scanning photos is just a
bonus. But once you've scanned in your photos, however you do it, you need to consider storage,
safety, and related workflow issues. And that's going to be the next topic I address. So,
this is a hook-up for hacker public radio signing off and is always encouraging you to support
free software. Bye-bye.
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