Arch Linux

ChojinDSL

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2010-11-30

Posts: 64

Website

Need to scan a huge photo collection....

I own a measly Canonscan Lide-25. Which is a slow flatbet usb scanner.
I would like to slowly but surely scan my families old photos, to reduce clutter and have them more easily available, rather than having to dust off old albums.

In the past my workflow was such, that I would:
place as many photos onto the glass as would fit.
Scan it all as one big image.
Use gimp to seperate the big image into invidual photos.

However, this all requires waaay too much manual intervention and even with the greatest motivation, eventually you just get fed up.

I was wondering if there any linux tools which can help automate the process.
It would be cool if I could just put multiple images onto the glass sheet, press the scanner button on the scanner and some app or script takes care of cutting and cropping the individual images.

Can anyone recommend a set of tools with which I could accomplish this? Or perhaps you can recommend a different method, or perhaps even a decently priced scanner that has a document feeder specifically for photos?

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Need to scan a huge photo collection....

Some (Windows) software that comes with the scanners often can do a pretty good job with cutting, cropping and rotating individual images. They can also fix contrast and saturation.
If your photo albums don't have any risque pictures, you can ask a neighborhood kid to do that for you ;P

Zerathidune

Member

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 102

Re: Need to scan a huge photo collection....

ImageMagick can probably be used to automate the separating of the images fairly easily, so long as you place them on the scanner in the same configuration each time.

As an aside: this probably belongs in multimedia and games, rather than GNU/Linux Discussion.