Scanning Time Again

My brother and I have been reworking the computers at our house.  This includes reconditioning and setup of one machine so my sister Adora can have it and use it at her house.  So far, my brother bought a DVD-drive, internal modem and a monitor, both setup with the computer which we'd be using at home.  The DVD-drive replaced the CD-R/W drive, the internal modem replaced the external (serial port) modem, and the 17-inch monitor replaced the 14-inch monitor.  I re-configured the PC, and now have the printer running again.  On the other PC, the only thing remaining are the software installation.  And, now I only have to download the drivers and setup the scanner.

Several years back, I started a project to save to soft-copy the pictures that I've taken since 1988.  That was the year I got married.  Until now, I still have most of the negatives for these pictures, and maybe one of these days, I'd get a (film) scanner and do those as well -- which would sound redundant to say the least.  In as much as there were several CD's which had their media film flaking off (or flaked off), I think I really need to redo the project again.

Nice thing about that project, scanning pictures thought me a lot about the technical aspects of digital photography, photo formats and archiving.  In addition, the rework will allow me to do the following:

1.  Scan the pictures at the highest optical resolution, and save as TIFF.  If needed, then these can be converted to JPEG (and play around with the levels, picture size, and cropping before saving).
2.  Organize in terms of folders.  In order to make any sense of the archiving, there should be logical a way to know how these are organized, so that finding individual pictures or groups of pictures would be relatively easy.
3.  Use durable media when saving to disk.  That means, using CD-R/W disks to do the job of CD-R disks.  Ideally, I would have chosen magneto-optical disks or DVD disks.

But first I've got to get the scanner going.

Then, maybe in the near future, get myself a digital camera, from Canon.  Or maybe a film scanner, or a good quality film-capable scanner.

--andoy