I love this scanner because it has a photo feeder. It allows you to scan stacks of photographs at one a time. I have found it to be the quickest and easiest way to get digital copies of old photographs and to get photo organized!
I’ve scanned thousands of old photographs, but I never sat down and timed exactly how fast can I scan an entire photo album. I needed to know, so today I timed that project!
I started by taking all of the photographs out of the photo album. The album I selected contained 160 pictures in sleeves. That does take a little time, however I was done and had the pictures neatly in a pile in just a little over 12 minutes.
- a tip to make scanning easier – make sure to keep the photographs in order as you remove them and pile the photographs all going the same direction.
Once I had all of the pictures in one pile I took them to my office and got to work scanning. This is the easy part! The Epson FastFoto scanner allows you to scan piles of photographs at one time. It suggests about 30 pictures, however I divided these 160 photographs into three equal piles and it had no problem sending them through the feeder and getting that digital scan.
Scanning the three piles of photographs (160 pictures total) took just over 7 minutes. It was fast! There are some variables to the exact speed though. One is the file size you select to have your images scanned.
In the settings for the Epson FastFoto scanner you can select file size. It comes preset to scan to 300DPI. This is perfect if you are looking to post your pictures online and not necessarily planning to ever make new prints from those digital scans. Set to 300DPI is also the fastest to scan because the file size is smaller. The next size up is 600DPI. I suggest going with this size because it will make a better print if you do opt to use that digital file to make a new printed picture. It is a larger size though, so the scanning time is a little slower. This is the setting I was at for this example. So as you can see, 160 pictures in seven minutes is still pretty speedy, even at 600DPI.
If time has been a reason for putting off this project, I think we can safely say I’ve debunked the “it takes too long” myth today! Even if you have 25 photo albums to scan it can be done in a months time with the smallest daily time commitment!
I would love to hear if you are going to be starting the photo scanning project soon too! I believe it is a super important project and something everyone should jump on!