03 August 2009

Pictures galore

On our last trip back to Indiana--May of '08--I bought a portable scanner and scanned in a boatload of family photos. Many were from my maternal grandmother's shoebox, and many more were held by my aunt and my sister. Somehow I never ended up with any family pictures... :(

So over the summer I've been going through the scans. Given that I had very limited time to do the scans originally, I usually scanned four or five pictures at a time, then flipped them over and scanned the writing on the backs. Now I'm separating out each image, and combining front and back side-by-side in the same image. It's not a complicated process, but it's very time-consuming. It's also something that desperately needs to be done, so I can go about finding out who some of these people are. When all of the pictures are separated out, I'm going to caption those that don't already have identifying notes. I'm also going to put together a filename system and spreadsheet-based database of all of my picture files that will include the names of the people and places in the photo (Shayna has already started this on her family photos). I've got a tentative filename structure planned out, but I haven't begun to implement it yet. When I get ready to do so, I'll post it here if anyone wants to give feedback on it.

I would like to get prints of some of these photos, but many are so grainy, dirty, or damaged that they wouldn't look very nice. Anyone know a good place to get photos touched up relatively inexpensively?