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

[Peter Orth]

Randy,

I have been working on an ever-improving camera scanning setup, and the results are fabulous, and the speed is SO MUCH faster than scanning with a scanner when it comes to negatives and transparencies of any size.
Capturing Negs in Raw format with a good lighting setup, a macro lens or enlarger lens, and a darkened room is the answer for me. Hand written info can be added to metadata, of course..
Careful though, it’s quite a rabbit hole. Info and endless discussions of details can be found on your social media channel of choice.

Digikam content: the color negative tool in the image editor works well! 

Peter Orth
310 413 8267


> On Oct 26, 2022, at 8:47 AM, Randy Wolf <randy.wolf at gmail.com> 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. 
> 
>