[digiKam-users] Feature, plugin, or advice scanning old photos

[James Orr]

I've scanned a couple thousand prints into Digikam. Facing the problem you describe, I searched for a good scanner that would do what I needed. I ended up with CanoScan 9000F Mark II as the best compromise between cost and capability.

It allows for multiple images on the platen, and sometimes gets the individual images properly defined. The first requirement is to have the pictures aligned as perfectly as possible with the platen edges. Within the Canon software there is an option to create individual frames for scanning. There are multiple present image ratios as well as user defined ones. Also the output size is adjustable in pixels. The more pixels, the bigger the file. Output can be in one of many formats; I have primarily used tiff.

A bit of care is required to be as free as possible from dust. Dust removal is a nuisance.

Also, the scanner has a top-light so that negatives 35mm up to 120 can be scanned in color and B/W.

On must use the ScanGear part of the software to get good results. It takes a bit of practice to figure out just how to get the output as you want it.

James M. Orr
2705 E Sussex Way
Fresno CA 93726
________________________________

7

If you could look with wisdom's eye you'd see:
The person that you count on is your foe.
It's better in these days to make few friends,
and always keep your distance when you speak.

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam– Juan Cole (trans) 2020

On 10/26/2022 8:47 AM, Randy Wolf wrote:
I have a two part question. Using digikam on windows.

I'm currently digitizing bunch of family photos using a scanner. Scanner has a crap feature to recognize and then scan bunch of individual photos placed on the platten at once. But it is implemented terribly, is slow, has poor edge detection, and generally not useful.

So... Questions

1) is there a feature or plugin or technique anyone knows of that would make it easy to scan a full platten with several photos and then easily split those photos into individual photos with the click of a button?

2) does anyone have a technique or best practice for scanning both sides of a photo which has writing on the reverse in such a way that the photo and the reverse of the photo stay together forever? It'd be cool if photo formats had embedded front/back images in single file. I don't want to (only) transcribe the writing because sometimes the handwriting itself can provide clues about who wrote it, so I want to scan it.

Bonus question: any chance we'll see a feature which will do OCR to auto transcribe words in photos and store it in searchable metadata? Useful for words in a photo but also for handwritten notes on the backs of photos as well.


Thanks to the community and especially devs for such a great product.



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