My existing business is [high volume] document scanning and I’m thinking of adding photograph scanning as an additional service seeing as we have a lot of the IT infrastructure in place already.

Has anybody already converted that drawer full of photo’s* to jpg’s yet?
If you were considering this service what would be on your wish-list: low price, speed of turnaround (say 24hrs), free collection, online delivery via dropbox or direct to an existing online photo library?

Any thoughts much appreciated.

*forumites younger than a certain age may not know about the drawer of photos!

my parents would probably be quite interested in this… my drawer of (pre-digital) photos isn’t large enough for me to be bothered.

wish list would include being able to cope with (possibly clean up???) ancient photos… possibly wanting recorded post for collections and returns (some photos are precious and wouldn’t be replaceable).

Dave

I’ve been looking recently.

I’m not sure speed of turnaround is a major requirement (not for me anyway), they’ve already been sat in a draw for 10 years!

It would be good if i just fill in something online, you send a box, i dump my stuff in, then it gets collected, then comes back some time later with a DVD/memory stick of good quality photos.

Minimum hassle and cost would be good.

what about slides?

metadata tagging could be useful too, so if photos have dates/names written on the back, could you populate the metadata fields?

Dave

I have done all mine, I didn’t need someone else to do it for me though. How lazy is that!

I keep thinking about doing this, but even if I only do the best of my old photos it would still be a slow and boring task. So yes – interested!

Just photos or negs as well?

Do all the things mentioned above (esp security – these things are irreplaceable!), including a secure dropbox/something similar upload, and you’re on.

I recall looking a while back ( a few years) and was put off by price.
If it really is a drawer full, it soon adds up.

I also found a bunch of slides which would be useful ( I know maplin do a slide scanner for £40 or something like that.

Most of the photos were still in packets with negatives attached – could these give better results? (might not fit your machinery)

Which brings the final point of naming – and dating , whilst it does not have to be that accurate date of photo taken is used as an index in picassa / iphoto etc. something better than undated or 1/1/70 needs to be input, just to break them up if nothing else.

What resolution could you realistically expect to get?
Nick

Edit must type faster

Yes I’d forgotten to add about the recorded delivery and I had thought about offering the box supply as an option. Good ideas, thanks.
Giving the option of DVD or USB is noted.
Their would be an online ordering system with various volume discounts.
Slides are a possibility.

Which brings the final point of naming – and dating , whilst it does not have to be that accurate date of photo taken is used as an index in picassa / iphoto etc. something better than undated or 1/1/70 needs to be input, just to break them up if nothing else

Looking at my drawer of photo’s the most realistic indexing system would be for each packet to be labeled with a subject/date which would then be applied to every photo in that batch i.e. “Skiing, Meribel 20012”
This info could simply be written on each packet or there could be an online form that would print off a barcode/label to fix to the packet.

Resolution would be 600dpi.

Negatives/slides are slower to scan and therefore much more costly – plus negative scanners are cheap so I’m not sure it’s something I’d look at immediately as I’m not sure people would be happy with the cost.
the other thing with negatives is that it used to be easy to lose a strip or two and I bet most people have more prints than negatives.

I’m trying to decide how to set up the web site with regards to pricing.
Obviously the more you send for scanning the lower the price is going to be.
I’ve got a pricing structure for 1-100, 101-250, 251-500 and 500+ pictures. Does it sounds reasonable for the buyer to need to know how many pictures there are for scanning and to enter this figure on the order form?
For instance you count your pictures and find there are 320. So you click on the 251-500 option and then enter 320 as the quantity. The web site then calculates any shipping charge and you pay by PayPal?
Alternatively if you don’t want to count the pictures you can simply select and pay for a higher amount and we would refund the difference once the scanning was completed.
Any thoughts?

Sharkbait, how time consuming is it for you to scan?

Do you have to manually scan each photograph or image?

If its automated, would be intrested in your setup?

I must have 5000 prints, mostly 6×4 that my Dad had, he only kept the prints, not a single neg!

I have been using a Epson V700 scanner, but tbh, its taking me ages!

😉

I used Digiscan in leatherhead.

Very pleased….. did what they said, no issues, and were reasonably priced too

have you tried scanning a whole bunch of old stock pics though? I’ve been doing some recently and some 1970s one have faint texture or laminate on them that you don’t notice to look at, but scanned it really shows up – looks like the pics are printed on canvas. Seems to me you could get caught up with a lot of snagging and problem solving. Difficult perhaps to configure and price your service if some folk give you a bunch of 1990s prints – all the same size and shape – and others give a mixed bag of daguerreotypes, instamatics and passport booth pics, with all sorts of funny textures and laminate and you are trying to deal with them for the same price and turnaround.

maccruiskeen, that canvas texture that machine prints have is a royal PITA when scanning! At least with four-colour printed originals you can do a Gaussian blur in channels then sharpen to get rid of it, but that texture won’t go away.
Scanning a bunch of different size originals shouldn’t be too much of an issue, the pre-scan should select each pic individually, then you just apply whatever parameters and size then go on to the next one. So much easier with flat-bed scanners than big drum scanners, believe me! Done many thousands over the years I was working pre-press.
Sadly, no longer. 🙁

Ski: YGM

I started doing this when I was unemployed. On a small scale for a neighbour. Word got round and I got 5 people sending me photos. It was a good cottage industry, boring and time consuming it helped me out of a potential financial jam. If you could ‘stack’ the photos in a scanner and do batches and have an automated ‘instant fix’ it would be a good service. 90% of the 1000 I scanned were fine for the clients with just a photoshop instant fix. There is a market out there.

I’m interested. Wish list is quality of results and price. Wouldn’t want the originals back, I’d just make sure I sent them securely.

EDIT: Of course there’d be none of me so I couldn’t be bribed on, say, an internet forum!! 😯

Stu: YGM too