Hello,
wondering if anyone can help, I have a couple hundred old photos which I want to put onto my PC to create a photobook with. I can't decide the best way to do this, some suggest using a scanner which is fine I can do but the quality isn't all that great and other suggest using a DSLR ( which I have ) to take a photo of the photo? I do have some negative/positive strips but I know this will take a long time to get onto my PC.
So we need a bit more information before we can advise... I'm guessing that you mostly have prints, but "some" negatives or transparencies.
a) what size(s) are the prints?
b) what size film is involved for the negatives or transparencies (usual choices are 35mm, properly 135, or medium format 120, but there are plenty of oddball sizes that make things more complicated).
c) do you have negatives/transparencies for all the photos? For quality (if not convenience) the negative or transparency is the place to start.
d) do you have (or have access to) a scanner that will do negatives and transparencies? If so, what is it?
e) what DSLR/lens combinations do you have with macro/close focus capability?
If you're starting from the prints, a reasonable all-in-one printer/scanner will probably do a decent job. However, the result is limited by the quality of the print, which is often warped, marked, damaged and/or faded. (It is worth noting however that negatives and transparencies, if not kept well, can also be damaged and in particular suffer from dust that of course appears many time magnified when scanned.)
If you want to get higher quality and have negatives or transparencies for all the photos you need, start from there. A reasonable quality scanner like the Epson V500 or up is of the order of £100 or more; older used versions are cheaper and still decent. Do not get one of those stand-alone cheapy things that effectively use a built-in digital camera to "scan" to a SD card!
Several people on here have converted negatives and transparencies (particularly) to digital using their DSLR/CSC. There are various small problems that can be solved with a bit of work. You need a light table (an iPad can suffice), a lens with close focus, and some kind of rig to keep the camera fixed with the image plane parallel to the source. For colour negatives, you'll also have to deal with the orange colour mask, which makes "inversion" a bit (or a lot) more complicated.
There are commercial services that will do this. If the negatives or transparencies are in strips, Photo Express in Hull will scan them for £5 or so a "roll", presumable 36 shots assuming 135. There are other services like Treasured Memories that I have investigated (some years ago) but not used. My feeling was that this would result in a jumble of unordered files, and that an important part of the work for me was identifying the images and putting them into some sort of structure. This would be part of making a book, anyway. As
@niko says, do them a few a day or a few a week and it will happen. I did a couple of thousand over a year or so, often just starting a scan in a TV advert break.
