scanning MANY images in a short amount of time

any tips/tricks/software to speed this up?

[Maylin]

I have a project I just took on that requires me to scan a LOT of images. I mean in the thousands. I got started today and it just hit me what a nightmare this is going to be. This is going by so SLOW and I haven't even scraped the surface of these boxes of pictures I have. There's nothing difficult about this, but it's so boring that it's driving me nuts.

Right now I'm using my laptop (running windows xp), a canon scanner, scangear (which came with the scanner), and photoshop. Every picture I scan into photoshop must be resized and saved.

Is there a program out there that will automatically save my pictures as I scan them in? Scangear won't go below 25% in scale, so I also need something to automate resizing.

Any help is VERY VERY VERY much appreciated, as my sanity is at stake.

[outrun]

Try vuescan it has a free trial version that may help you.

regards,
Mark

[limbo]

To automate the resize you can batch process through Photoshop - especially good if the majority of you images are the same size and rotation (portrait/landscape) this way once you have completed the scans you can run a batch process on a folder of images and just let it run till complete.

[Maylin]

Wow, vuescan works great! Looks like I can do everything I need just using the demo.

I also looked up how to do batch processing in photoshop. I wasn't aware of this feature but that's something very useful to know.

I have a low boredom threshold when it comes to doing repetitive tasks all day long, but this is going by much faster now. Thanks guys!

[topr8]

that link looks interesting, but i have a similiar problem possibly 20,000 images to scan.

i'm looking into buying a high end faster scanner, does anyone have any experience, also i have a max budget of around 600 ukpounds, approx 1000 usd.

the only requirement is to scan in printed pictures fast at a top resolution of 300dpi, but mostly at only 72dpi.

any pointers?

[visca]

Maybe some of these tips might help...

- Pickup a USB2 based scanner for faster data transfer, its actually pumping a fair amount of data through the wire and the increased USB2 bandwidth would help (scanners are dirt cheap these days anyway).

- Maybe consider a scanner that has a document / photo feeder attachment. That can help take the manual labor out of the process.

- Download and install the latest drivers for the scanner, sometimes the drivers included are flakey (rushed to market, my HP scanner's drivers are garbage bloat code) and the latest revisions can help.

- In PhotoShop use the scanner's TWAIN driver to scan in images and most importatnly, disable preview so that you only need a single scan pass.

- Save the images as you go along, then later on you can 'batch' resize the images with a script.

Hope that helps.