One of the many projects I’ve been working on is converting all of the pieces of paper I have hanging around into digital versions (and then safely hiding the paper versions away). A couple years ago I tried using a cheap film scanner to take care of the thousands of pictures I’ve accumulated, but ran into a number of problems (the operative word turning out to be cheap film scanner).
I’m having a bit more luck with HP’s ScanJet 5500c. The ScanJet 5500c has a photo document feeder — essentially a document feeder that is designed to accommodate stacks of photographs up to 4×6″.
Over the last two months I’ve scanned in about 2,000 photographs and so far have few complaints. I have run into some problems with jams, but for the most part those involved either a) photographs that were somewhat warped or b) photographs that were not cleanly cut during developing.
I generally scan the photos at 600 DPI and the highest color setting, which usually results in TIFF files of 17mb to 20mb. I use those files to generate smaller JPEGS for my web site and then archive the TIFF files on CD-R (still waiting to buy a larger hard drive to store all of the photos in one place).