Sunday, August 9, 2009

Scanfest Decisions

We (well mostly I) have been continuing the Great Scanfest 2009. We're past the halfway mark on the first box. Luckily, we can scan 4 pictures at a time. The daughter made a great decision early on to scan each and every photo. There are some - the blurry ones, the ones of old friends we no longer keep in touch with, the ones of things we don't care about, etc.- that I thought we could skip, but I now agree that this way we don't have to worry about which ones have been scanned and which ones haven't. It does save on the decision making, so it probably makes the process go much faster. The problem is the free double prints we have a lot of. It is fine when the prints are next to each other so only one has to be scanned, but you know, they almost never are right next to each other. Which means I scanned this blurry photo twice. The other one was turned the right way, but this one hasn't been.

The tagging decisions are harder to come by. I had a trial version of Adobe which did a great job of categorizing location, person, event, date, etc, but with tagging all those things get jumbled together. I thought keeping them separate would make them easier to find, so I thought "Location: Washington, D.C." would work better than Washington, or Washington D.C., or D.C. The kid thinks that is too much work. I think it is fine to tag it whichever, and we can move them to the right place as a group, so it isn't really an issue right now.

In the meantime, I am still working on the Blushing Bride quilt. I am really liking the variegated thread I have chosen to use. I am anxious to get on to the next quilt - hopefully making another coins quilt, but simple this time around.

I am also shopping to take advantage of all those great back to school sales.

6 comments:

Beena said...

All that scanning sounds like so much work! I guess I take my digital camera and the accompanying software for granted. The only thing I use my scanner for, are sketches! Good luck with this tremendous undertaking.
I'll be school shopping myself here in the next few weeks...where did summer go?

Donna said...

you're making great progress on the box of photos! I'm sure it feel very tedious, but the long term benefit for you and your family will be wonderful.

Allie said...

Oh that is so much work~ But good for you, I need to do this too. The organizing thing will be hard - I have embroidery designs that I've had for years, and I still haven't put them in a proper order. Yikes.

Mrs. Goodneedle said...

Groan... I had a scanfest myself earlier this summer with magazine articles, nearly did me in!

Michele Bilyeu said...

I love how your genealogy interests work into preserving your history, as well. I did a scanfest a few years ago beginning with my children's baby photos and ended up giving up after three of 25 photo albums.I wasn't even into toddlerhhood yet for the second child and never started on infancy of the 3rd!

It is truly time consuming work! You are to be commended beyond what most people are even imagining!!!!!

And,you are also making me realize I at least should scan my favorites that I would cry over if I lost!

MARCIE said...

I should do some more scanning too. What I have scanned are old pictures of my grandparents for the sake of preserving them before they are totally destroyed. It is long and tedious, but what a thrill to know they are "safe" on my computer. I signed up for Carbonite also, to protect my files. Your files look much more organized than mine. As I go thru personal family pics I have been tossing out some as we don't really need that many. Just keeping the best!