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

[Henrik Hemrin]

Adding a few comments from my experience, although not directly answers to your questions. 

So far, and I will continue, I use a flat bed scanner and a film scanner. Nowadays I use VueScan (https://www.hamrick.com/) software. 

I have just prepared myself with equipment so I also can do repro with a camera. My trigger for that is old photo albums where the photos are glued. I do not dare to rip them out as that will more or less destroy the photos. Nor is it easy to manage in a flat bed. So I am looking forward to try with the camera. Eventually I will test also for heg and pos due to the speed advantage, but prel I will continue with the scanner method. For Tethered camera control and capture, I have tested with Entangle which I think is promising (https://entangle-photo.org/), but that sw is only for those on Linux or BSD. A friend at my photo club has shared two ppt-presentations, text in Swedish but might be of interest. (I have not watch the suggested video below). https://www.erifk.se/presentationer/ 

Regards
Henrin Hemrin



> 26 okt. 2022 kl. 17:47 skrev Randy Wolf <randy.wolf at gmail.com>:
> 
> 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. 
> 
>