Hiya fedi, I need your knowledge! The family wants to digitise a big collection of old photographs, negatives and photo slides. I know there’s services we can send the material to that do this for a living, but grandpa is afraid to hand them off for fear of them getting damaged, lost etc. So I need to figure out how to do this “in house” as best I can.
I’ve figured out there’s specific photo scanners, instead of a flat bed scanner, that should be able to handle the negatives and the slides.
But what I don’t know is about good software to scan and archive them properly, what things to watch out for when doing this and what kind of software exists that could help restore and enhance the digital copies.
It doesn’t matter if this is a slow going process, there’s no deadline here.
If you have any recommendations for hardware equipment, software or documentation and protocols to read I’d be very grateful. I would prefer to do this using open source software but if there’s proprietary software that makes a meaningful difference I’m happy to consider it.
(I know how to search the web myself, so I’m looking for advice from folks with practical experience, not just a Google search hit or whatever an LLM misgenerated.)
Boost would be appreciated since unfortunately I’m short on folks with this type of knowledge in my own social circles.
