Scan, Scan, Scan

It all started simply enough. I had an HP flatbed scanner (I don't recall the model) that came with this little mirror device that would redirect light from the scanner back down through a 2"x2" mounted 35mm slide so that you could scan the slide. Resolution? Oh, probably 400 or 600 dpi. It worked OK (just OK) for well-exposed or slightly over-exposed slides. Not so well for underexposed slides. I may have scanned a few dozen slides, but the quality wasn't adequate for me.

Some time later, I purchased a dedicated film scanner (Nikon Coolscan 3000).

The Nikon Coolscan 3000 could scan up to 2,700 dpi. At first, I thought this was more resolution than I needed, so scanned many slides and negatives at 1,350 dpi. About enough for a decent 4"x6" print.

It wasn't long before I wanted better. So I purchased a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED film scanner, capable of 4,000 dpi resolution. And I upped my default scanning resolution to a whopping 2,000 dpi, scanning some specific negatives and slides at 3,000 or even 4,000 dpi if I thought I wanted larger prints from them. Eventually, disk space got really cheap and I realized that I should just scan everything at the maximum resolution. So all 35mm film I've scanned for the last 4 years or so is at 4,000 dpi. Eventually I purchased a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED film scanner, which also scans at 4,000 dpi, but had a few more features that hopefully would improve my scan quality.

For image viewing and printing software, I used ACDSee, and later, ACDSee Pro. Not sure when I purchased this, but know I owned it in 2001. I still use it for specific purposes, which I will describe in a future blog.

When my friend/neighbor Jenne was about 7th grade (around 2008), I got this idea to create a photo book for her for her senior graduation (plan ahead...). I had been shooting all digital since 2003 or 2004, but had known Jenne since her arrival and adoption in the United States in 1998, so had around 6 years of photos on film. Before this time I had occasionally scanned some of my photos, but hadn't gotten really serious about it. I had probably scanned a thousand images.

So I started scanning photos of her. But, where to stop? What if the roll of film I was scanning had some other interesting photos? Should I not scan those? Or scan those? I opted to scan all. My scanner/software could scan a strip of negatives at a time, so it was easy to insert a strip and let it automatically do a preview of all negatives in the strip (usually 4), then select which to scan. But I also wanted to keep track of which rolls of film and which negatives had been scanned. The scanner software could accept a filename pattern, and automatically increment a number within that pattern. So I decided to make the filenames include the negative number.

To start with (I think - this was years ago, and I've been refining my scheme through the years, and don't recall all details, or the exact order of the evolution), I put the images from each roll of film in its own folder, and labeled them something like IMAGE00l.JPG, IMAGE002.JPG, etc. More about the evolution of my file naming conventions in a future blog.

Now that I had a goal, and a deadline (Jenne's graduation), I started scanning everything I had shot since 1998 up until I was shooting all digital (around 2005). I had tried multiple tools for cataloging through the years, but they each had its own proprietary database. At one point, an upgrade to a new version of a tool lost all of the data from the previous version. I knew what I wanted, and it wasn't available. I looked at a professional digital asset management tool that was, in my mind, too complex (and quite expensive). I knew the only way this could work was to store the cataloging information in the image file.

And I continued scanning.

To go back a few years... Cataloging my photos was something I have thought about since early in my photography days. I started shooting when I was around 10 or 11 when my dad gave me his old Kodak 620 folding camera (I still have it). I then upgraded (?) to a Kodak Instamatic with a little pop-up flash that used 126 film. When I graduated high school, I could still look at any photo I had shot, and recall the circumstances of the photograph. By the time I got through college, I could still remember pretty much any photo, but storage was becoming an issue. I was shooting all 35mm slides at that point, and was filing them by subject matter in slide storage boxes. Being able to remember any shot allowed this to work. If I wanted a particular photo, I could remember where I had filed it.

I had subjects such as Family, Friends, Church, Scenery... I knew this wasn't going to work much longer. How should I file a slide that had pictures of, for example, Family at Church? So I switched to filing slides chronologically. Sometime in the mid-'70s I learned about Key Word In Context (KWIC) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Word_in_Context). I wrote a computer program to implement this. Here's a simple example of how it worked.

Say I had a photo (labeled Photo 045) that I described as "Dad and Randy at Mt. Rainier." The KWIC program would ignore a list of connector and filler words (such as "at" and "Mt."), and generate one line of output for each significant work in the sentence. Thus this description would generate 3 lines of output:

1. Dad and Randy at Mt. Rainier - (Photo 045)
2. Randy at Mt. Rainier - Dad and (Photo 045)
3. Rainier - Dad and Randy at Mt. (Photo 045)

Let's say I also had Photo 060 with a description of "Mom and Dad at Christmas." This description also generates three lines:

1. Mom and Dad at Christmas - (Photo 060)
2. Dad at Christmas - Mom and (Photo 060)
3. Christmas - Mom and Dad at (Photo 060)

Now I would have an output file that could have thousands of lines of output for maybe 1,000 photo descriptions. It would then be sorted alphabetically, yielding:

1. Christmas - Mom and Dad at (Photo 060)
2. Dad and Randy at Mt. Rainier - (Photo 045)
3. Dad at Christmas - Mom and (Photo 060)
4. Mom and Dad at Christmas - (Photo 060)
5. Rainier - Dad and Randy at Mt. (Photo 045)
6. Randy at Mt. Rainier - Dad and (Photo 045)

and I could now scan down the list for the subjects of interest and locate the photos. In reality, after I had entered about 100 photos, I realized this was quickly going to become too cumbersome, so I abandoned it.

In 2006, Adobe announced the beta of Lightroom. It could catalog. It could edit photos. And it stored the data in the image file! I immediately downloaded it, and started learning how to use it. (I'm still learning.) I started tagging images with keywords, and those are all stored in a database and in the image file. My dream had become reality.

By then I had thousands of images on disk, as I had started shooting digital in 2002, plus I had scanned a "few" slides and negatives. I tried to go back and catalog everything, but I missed many hundreds of photos, and my cataloging was incomplete. But at least I could quickly and easily locate all images I had cataloged.

Now I could continue scanning. And cataloging both the scanned images and the ones shot on digital cameras. And continue scanning I am doing. I've scanned photos for friends. I've scanned negatives my dad shot in the Army, and of me when I was a year or two old. And negatives my Grandpa shot when my Mom was 1 year old, and through her high school years, and of me. I have 100-200 rolls of negatives that I got from my Mom that she has shot before switching to digital that I am scanning. And cataloging. She also has several (at least) file boxes of slides, of which I have only scanned one or two.

All told, I now have, at this moment, 134,620 photos in Lightroom. I have scanned somewhere over 20,000 of those, and the rest are from digital cameras, mine, family and friends.

And, yes, I completed the photo book for Jenne. It consisted of about 800 photos, beginning with her arrival in the United States of America through her high school graduation. I was a little late to give it as a graduation present, but it did make a good Christmas present that year. In case you are wondering, I have 10,247 photos cataloged of Jenne. I'm sure I've missed a few. And, over the years, Jenne helped me pick the photos she liked. She didn't know the goal, but I would occasionally show here several hundred photos that I had selected, and have her mark (with a special key word) the ones she liked. Thank you for your help, Jenne!

And her younger sister is now only four years from graduation. I have another task ahead of me. The good news is the film photos of her are already scanned.

Scanning these photos allows me to share these old photos with friends and family. And it brings back good memories. Here is a photo of the sails on the ship Fantome on a cruise in the Caribbean in 1991.